I've been living in Australia for the past few months, and have been taking a course in criminology, so while I've been isolated from the actual news coverage of the McVeigh execution back home, I have seen how people here have reacted to it. The U.S. as a country looks vengeful and stupid, people from other democracies don't understand how the U.S. can preach all its rhetoric about human rights, e.g. threatening to take away china's most favored nation trade status because of human rights violations on prisoners and such, and yet continue to use the death penalty, which tends to take away people's human rights by killing a fair proportion of innocent people. I don't believe timothy mcveigh deserved a second chance, some crimes are too heinous for that, and the fact that he had no remorse at all shows that he didn't deserve to be in society. But at the same time, the death penalty itself is flawed, and I don't believe it should be used, even for someone as terrible and remorseless as mcveigh. A few years back I didn't have an opinion on the death penalty one way or the other, but then the governer of illinois himself took a stand, and decided that illinois would no longer be a death penalty state, because it was often missapplied to innocent people, especially people who were poor or minorities, becuase they often lacked the means to get a fair trial. Obviously, there are much deeper problems in the U.S. than just the death penalty being applied disproportionately to minorities, for example the way the whole justice system is skewed against poor people and minorities, but doing away with the death penalty is a good start, and a very necessary step. The problem is that high profile cases like mcveigh tend to legitimize the death penalty, because "he killed 168 people and didn't care, he had no remorse", and "it helped the victims' families to get closure". The fact is, I don't think watching him show no remorse and die believing himself to be a martyr would make me feel any better, and this society shouldn't be founded on vengeance. High profile cases like this one and ted kaczynski are almost a smoke screen, and as long as they continue to dominate the death penalty debate, people won't pay attention to the regular, mundane application of it in states like texas and florida, where innocent people are killed. The justice system in the U.S. was supposed to be set up so that nobody could be wrongly convicted, as this is not always the case today we can at least make sure that nobody is wrongly killed by the state.