McVeigh faces death for OKC bombing; will Nichols?

"Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill it teaches the people by its example."
Timothy McVeigh at his sentencing, quoting the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

The horror and grief caused by the deaths of 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing came to rest at the feet of Timothy McVeigh in June 1997.

But the 29-year-old Gulf War veteran did not apologize, confess or beg for mercy when he was sentenced in a Denver courtroom to die by lethal injection.

In his trial, prosecutors said McVeigh saw himself as a patriot angry over alleged abuses of the Constitution by the federal government and that he hoped to start a second American revolution through the 1995 bombing.

McVeigh's own sister, Jennifer, told jurors of her brother's rage against the government for the 1993 siege near Waco, Texas.

Perhaps the most compelling testimony came from family members of bombing victims, who gave wrenching accounts of how the tragedy affected them.

In the end, the case against McVeigh convinced a jury that he should die.

The trial of Terry Nichols, McVeigh's accomplice, ended on December 23 when a jury found him guilty of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and guilty of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of eight federal agents, who died in the blast.

But he was found not guilty of use of a weapon of mass destruction, and destruction by explosive.

Nichols could receive the death penalty on the conspiracy charge.

The prosecution had called 98 witnesses, among them Michael Fortier, considered the government's star witness.

Fortier testified that Nichols was present when McVeigh took him to a storage shed containing explosives. The defense sought to discredit Fortier's testimony and raised the specter of John Doe No. 2, who they argued was McVeigh's real accomplice.