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After weekend break, jury resumes Nichols deliberations
December 22, 1997
Web posted at: 10:48 a.m. EST (1548 GMT)
Nichols
DENVER (CNN) -- The jury considering Terry Nichols' fate in the second Oklahoma City bombing trial began its fifth day of deliberations on Monday after taking a break for the weekend.
Jurors had deliberated about 25 hours by the end of the day Friday -- already, more time than the jury that convicted Timothy McVeigh spent deliberating his case. Yet it is hard to judge how close or how far they are from reaching a verdict.
"This jury has a lot of work ahead of it," said Andrew Cohen, an attorney watching the trial. "Almost 200 witnesses testified. There were hundreds and hundreds of exhibits they might want to look at. And so if they're going to do their job right, it's probably gonna take a little bit longer than this."
The panel of seven women and five men must decide whether Nichols, 42, is guilty of any or all of the 11 charges stemming from the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, including murder, conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction. If convicted, he could face a death sentence. Timothy McVeigh, 29, was convicted of those same charges last June and sentenced to die.
A juror in the McVeigh trial, Martha Hite, said: "I don't really think I have any advice for (the Nichols jurors). We'll have to trust that they'll do the best they can and I wish them well in getting the job done."
In determining a verdict, jurors must decide whether Nichols and McVeigh were close friends, as the government suggests, or had gone their separate ways, as the defense argued.
They must consider whether Nichols shared McVeigh's strong anti-government views or was simply one of many people McVeigh tried to recruit.
The question of whether others were involved looms over the panel.
Do they believe sightings of a Ryder truck and a truck like Nichols' at Geary Lake, Kansas -- where prosecutors say the bomb was built?
Do barrels found in Nichols' home really match pieces of plastic found at the bomb site? And was the truck bomb made of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and racing fuel, as the FBI crime lab suggested?
The jurors are not being sequestered.
U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch went beyond his usual cautionary advice before dismissing the jurors for the weekend Friday.
Matsch said that since it was the weekend before Christmas, he was sure the jurors had plans.
"I'm not going to tell you to sit in a dark room all weekend. I'm sure you have some things to do. But be very careful," he said.
The jury began deliberations Tuesday afternoon and has stopped only once to submit a request to the judge -- for a chronological list of the 192 witnesses who testified and for information it could review about Nichols' activities in the fall of 1994, the period in which the bomb plot purportedly was devised.
The truck bomb that exploded outside the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killed 168 people and injured hundreds.
Correspondent Tony Clark contributed to this report.
T H E B O M B I N G / C N N S T O R I E S / L I N K S
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