a holding cell to the execution room. The document instructs prison staff to ``prevent emotion or intimidation'' from hindering them in their duties. Some 30 witnesses -- six of them chosen by McVeigh, some media representatives and a number of victims -- will watch through the windows of an adjoining room as McVeigh, strapped onto a gurney, is asked whether he wishes to make a last statement. Officials have already advised him that any statement should be kept ``reasonably brief''. He will then be injected with a lethal mixture of sodium pentothal, pavulon and potassium chloride. Death is expected to be swiftApril 13, 2001 Witnesses to an Execution itnesses to an ExecutionIn a press conference yesterday, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the execution of Timothy McVeigh on May 16 in Terre Haute, Ind., would be televised via a live, encrypted, closed- circuit telecast. It will be shown in an unnamed facility in Oklahoma City for families of the victims who were killed in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. The telecast will not be recorded. Instead it will be, as Mr. Ashcroft put it, "instantaneous and contemporaneous," leaving no permanent record for others to view.This is a warrantable solution to a basic logistical problem — the sheer number of direct victims of Mr. McVeigh's crime. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which allows the families of victims to witness an execution, has increased the number of such witnesses allowed at the prison in Terre Haute to 10. But it was impractical to accommodate on-site all interested relatives of the 168 people who died in Oklahoma City, and many of them would be hard pressed to make the journey to another state in any case. Thus Mr. Ashcroft made the sensible decision to allow the execution to be transmitted on closed- circuit television to this group. There is no telling what emotions the survivors and victims' families will feel when they watch that telecast. There...
