Terry Nichols verdict

The pre-Christmas verdict for Terry Nichols was an opportunity for healing and an end to the tragedy of the Oklahoma City bombing. Instead, the families of the victims expressed disappointment and shock over the jury’s decision; instead of closure, they got compromise.

Only through odd twists of logic does the jury’s conclusion make sense that Mr. Nichols was guilty of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction but not guilty of premeditated murder. Instead the jury found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter, a far lesser charge. Now the bombing victims’ frineds and family members, who have had to bear up under horrific circumstances since the blast April 19, 1995, are asked to accept a further unfairness in this case.

The Nichols trial was bound to be more complicated that that of Timothy McVeigh’s because Mr. Nichols was not in Oklahoma City on the day of the explosion. The jury had to rely on a huge amount of circumstantial evidence to make a conclusion. Telephone records, receipts, suggestive letters, the haul from a money-raising robbery and dozens of other pieces of evidence added up to Mr. Nichol’s involvement in the plot. The jury’s struggle was over his intentions.

It is hard to accept that he was not aware of the intended target of the bomb he helped build. It is hard to accept that the platoon leader Mr. McVeigh looked up to in the Army would be kept in the dark about any of the plans. In his instructions to the jurors, according to news reports, Judge Richard P. Matsch told them first-degree murder would mean the defendant was guilty of killing people “unlawfully, willfully, deliberately, maliciously and with premeditation.” Involuntary manslaughter, however, was a killing in which the defendant acted in a way that lacked “due caution,” that “might be a threat to the lives of others” and that was known by the defendant to contain such a threat.

No one but the jurors knows exactly what went on during their lengthy deliberations, but to the spectator their decision looked like a negotiation, a compromise. Get him on the serious conspiracy charge but onlyh on the much weaker manslaughter charge. Perhaps it was their way of distinguishing him from his co-conspirator in the bombing.

State-level prosecution still is possible, but for the families awaiting justice, the Nichols verdict must represent an end to the tragedy — an unsatisfying, inconclusive, confusing, sad end to the worst moment of their lives.