Timothy McVeigh

Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist who killed 168 people in the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

Sentencing
McVeigh stated that he chose that date because it was the second anniversary of the conflagration that occurred at the end of a prolonged siege by federal law enforcement of a religious group in Waco, Texas. At sentencing, he stated simply, "If the Court please, I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead to speak for me. He wrote, 'Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.' That's all I have." McVeigh had previously argued that his bombing was morally equivalent to attacks carried out by the U.S. Government, arguing, "Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad? What about the big ones &mdash; Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (At these two locations, the U.S. killed at least 150,000 non-combatants &mdash; mostly women and children &mdash; in the blink of an eye. Thousands more took hours, days, weeks, or months to die.)" He was sentenced to death and executed on 11 June 2001.