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US Feds sweat over McVeigh execution
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US authorities have staged more than 700 executions since the death penalty was re-introduced in 1976, but none of them has concentrated minds like that of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh on Monday.
Federal officials have been sweating over the details for the past 18 months, visiting prisons in Texas and Virginia, the nations' top two executioners, and liaising with journalists on media coverage plans.
The states were "very helpful to us," said Bureau of Prisons official Dan Dunne, who observed an execution in Delaware to prepare for his work as chief spokesman for the McVeigh execution.
"We wanted to learn from them."
Warden Harley Lappin, the director of the maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, which McVeigh has called home for the past 23 months, meanwhile went to Texas to witness a judicial killing there.
"He spent an awful lot of time with the people involved in the execution, from the tie-down team, to the warden and the people responsible for the chemicals," said Larry Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
"This was really a hands-on type of thing."
The 44-year-old civil servant should have had two executions under his belt by now: two of McVeigh's neighbours in the nation's only federal death row unit had earlier dates with death.
But, by a quirk of fate -- both David Hammer and Juan Garza were granted stays at the last minute -- it will be the 33-year-old Gulf War veteran who blew up the Alfred P Murrah building in Oklahoma City who will have the dubious honour of being the first prisoner executed by federal authorities in 38 years.
And that has certainly cranked up the pressure on officials inexperienced in the workings of the US capital punishment system.
"It's kind of unploughed ground for the feds," noted Fitzgerald.
In something of an understatement, Warden Lappin's spokesman Jim Cross, acknowledged that "the notoriety of the defendant," had certainly intensified media scrutiny of the event.
Some 1,700 members of the global press corps have registered to cover the event -- such as it is -- in the early hours of Monday.
The Federal Aviation Authority has declared an air exclusion zone over the penitentiary grounds to keep helicopters away.
State, city and county officials in and around Terre Haute have been given that day off, and the schools have been shut down in Vigo County to free up security staff to help with the policing arrangements -- among other reasons.
And while the logistics of managing the event are stretching the resources of the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons, the ripple effects are also being felt inside the special confinement unit that is home to McVeigh and 19 others.
"There's a very somber mood among them," said Sister Rita Clare Gerardot, a Roman Catholic nun and spiritual advisor to David Hammer, another death row inmate in Terre Haute.
"They are dealing with the reality as well as they can."
Prior to McVeigh's 7.00 am (1200 GMT) Monday execution by lethal injection, Hammer and 13 others in the penitentiary's special confinement unit will observe 168 minutes of silence along with anti-death penalty demonstrators outside the penitentiary.
"They will set aside a time of silence for prayer and meditation," said Gerardot. The 168 minutes represent one minute for every victim of the 1995 bombing.
"I am sure they are going to be praying for themselves as well," she added.
In the midst of all this, the man who will be strapped to a gurney while lethal chemicals are pumped into his body to stop his heart and his breathing, remains composed, according to observers.
"Tim is preparing to die. He will approach death with the courage of a soldier," said Father Ron Ashmore, a Roman Catholic priest who assists the prison chaplain at the penitentiary and is in regular contact with the 33-year-old.
(SD-Agencies)
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