Legal Commentary

I've always thought that the McVeigh jurors' Oklahoma City visit is one of the most interesting chapters in the Oklahoma City bombing story. 

Juries are fascinating institutions--their behaviors are at once so visible, and so private.  And as visually accessible as they are during trial, jurors are regarded as "off limits" during and often after litigation as well.  They often remind me of scorpion fish...it's entrancing to watch them move along, but it's hard to forget that contact with them is regarded as legally poisonous for certain individuals (such as parties to an action).

Jurors are often charged to deliberate and deliver verdicts based on reason and not emotion, on facts or evidence and not passion.  As a law and emotion scholar, I very much agree with scholars who have problematized the  binary "emotion/reason" distinction.  Thus, it seems to me a matter of common sense that jurors will or do feel more (or more positive emotions) for some parties than for others; I see these ties as inevitable and therefore not a subject of alarm in general.  Although this oversimplifies the concept of "emotion," the mere fact that a jury feels emotions towards certain parties does not render their determinations illegitimate.  Emotions can educate as well as prejudice.  Sentencing testimony often reduces jurors in capital cases to tears--but they do not always convict a defendant of murder; the jury in Nichols' federal trial convicted him of involuntary manslaughter.  Our court system has managed to rub along for quite a while now, its adjudication machinery lubricated in part by emotion.      

But these ties come to the fore when, every so often, a juror, a party to the case, or a victim or victim's family member tries to establish contact with someone on the opposite side of the jury box after the jury has been dismissed.  Sometimes victims' family members and friends will thank jurors as they leave the courtroom (see story here), and one juror engendered media inquiry after she sent flowers to the defendant in a vehicular homicide trial as a "goodwill gesture" after he was acquitted (see here).

In the McVeigh case, after the jurors in Denver convicted him of all 11 counts and sentenced him to death, one of the jurors stated in a media interview that she would like to visit Oklahoma City one day.  A coalition of family members and survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing granted that wish one year after the McVeigh trial.  Members of this group wanted to thank jurors for their service and for essentially putting their lives on hold during the difficult trial.  All but one of the jurors and alternates traveled to Oklahoma City from Denver, Colorado in June 1998 with their spouses or support persons.  That weekend, jurors planted a tree at the state capitol building in memory of bombing victims, visited the bombing site, and attended dinners with other family members and survivors.  Family members, survivors, and jurors remarked that the visit allowed them to "come full circle" after the trial experience.  Jurors appreciated the opportunity to more fully contextualize the evidence they had heard at trial and delighted in actually speaking with those family members and survivors that had given impact testimony as well as meeting many others.  Family members and survivors regarded the opportunity to meet and speak with jurors as integral to their reconstructive efforts.  Both groups wanted to express appreciation and gratitude and give support and reassurance.  

Predictably, the jury's visit was controversial; lawyers for both McVeigh and Nichols panned the idea as in appropriate or outrageous.  Though Oklahoma officials were more enthusiastic about the visit, attorneys involved with McVeigh's federal prosecution were against the visit, concerned that it would tarnish the dignity of the criminal justice system and potentially affect McVeigh's appeals.  A legal scholar uninvolved in the case stated in a media interview that this was a "terrible thing for the jury system" because it improperly held jurors accountable for their decision and was cathartic for family members. 

The McVeigh jury's visit to Oklahoma City was certainly unorthodox.  But it violated no court rules.  As they stated in their replies to critics of the visit, the jurors were private citizens at the time of the visit (although the visit itself stemmed from their jury service).  And if family members and survivors found it cathartic, the trial was over.  At the time of the visit, there were many references to the McVeigh jury verdict as proof that the "system worked"--that jurors were able to "put aside" emotion and render a verdict based on the evidence. 

There was no such visit for the jurors in Nichols' federal trial, where he was convicted of the capital count oof conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction but not of the eight counts of first degree murder for the deaths of the federal employees.  Instead, the jury opted for the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter.  Nichols was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after the jury deadlocked on whether or nor to sentence him to death because they disagreed on whether Nichols intended people to die in the blast.  Presumably, Nichols' verdict it did not prove that the "system worked" as the McVeigh case did for various reasons, including issues with jury selection where Nichols' attorney Michael Tigar was allowed to rehabilitate potential jurors.  The jury's verdict is a somewhat strange animal; one would think that conspiring to use a weapon of would entail the knowledge that people would be killed. 

When I discuss this story with my colleagues, it never fails to spark an interesting discussion about law and the propriety of emotions and emotionality inside and outside the courtroom--issues about which legal scholars and practitioners remain undecided.