Forty-three percent say the failure to disclose more than 3,000 pages of interview reports was an attempt to conceal something embarrassing to government or law enforcement-even if it wasn’t relevant to McVeigh’s guilt or innocence, the poll shows. Forty percent say the failure was the result of an accident or bureaucratic error.
Still, 79 percent of Americans polled by NEWSWEEK say the error doesn’t make them less supportive of the death penalty in general and 72 percent say Timothy McVeigh should still be executed. Fifty-five percent say the development makes them think co-conspirators were involved in the bombing.
On Friday, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Timothy McVeigh’s execution for the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City would be delayed until June 11. McVeigh’s original execution date was May 16.
Forty six percent of people in the poll say the execution should not be televised at all; 34 percent say it should be shown on closed-circuit television only for family members of the victims to watch. If executions in general were televised for the public, a resounding 72 percent said they would not watch under any circumstances.
In the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 25 percent say they oppose the death penalty in all cases. That’s up from 19 percent in a June 2000 NEWSWEEK poll and up from 17 percent in 1995. Almost half (49 percent) of Americans polled say new DNA evidence suggesting that some people sentenced to death have been wrongly convicted has had a major effect on their views toward the death penalty. Thirty-nine percent say the same thing about recent news reports of mistakes in crime labs leading to wrongful convictions in capital cases.
For this Newsweek poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates interviewed 1,057 adults aged 18 and older by telephone on May 10 and May 11. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
