February 28, 1996
Web posted at: 9:50 p.m. EST
OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma (CNN) -- The judge in the Oklahoma City bombing attack set a schedule Wednesday that ensures the case won't go to trial before fall.
Suspects Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols face 11 counts of murder, terrorism, and conspiracy for April's attack on the Oklahoma City federal building that took 168 lives.
The next hearing will be May 1 in Denver, where the trial has been moved. At issue in that hearing: whether the death penalty would be constitutional in a terrorism case like this.
The last hearing planned will be August 27. It will focus on whether McVeigh and Nichols will be tried together, as the government prefers, or tried separately, as the defense wants.
Any trial is not expected to begin until at least a month after that hearing, probably sometime in October or November. One other hearing is planned for June 27 and 28, when U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch will hear arguments by the defense to try to bar the prosecution from using statements Nichols gave the FBI when he was first taken into custody.
Nichols admitted in those statements he drove to Oklahoma City on Easter Sunday, three days before the bombing, to pick up McVeigh near the federal building, and gave him a ride back to Junction City, Kansas, where the truck used in the bombing was rented the next afternoon.
Prosecutors have quoted Nichols as saying McVeigh told him on that drive back to Kansas, "Something big is going to happen."
Investigators think McVeigh left his car parked somewhere near the federal building that Sunday to use as a getaway vehicle. McVeigh was arrested April 19 when a state trooper stopped him on an interstate highway 78 miles north of Oklahoma City, 78 minutes after the bombing.
Nichols was at home in Herington, Kansas, south of Junction City, when the two-ton homemade truck bomb brought down the federal building. He was first taken into custody as a material witness and was not charged with the crime until three weeks later. His statements to the FBI are considered crucial to the prosecution case against him.
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