After President George W. Bush approved the execution (McVeigh was a federal inmate and federal law dictates that the President must approve the execution of federal prisoners), he was executed by lethal injection at the Federal Correctional Complex, Terre Haute in Terre Haute, Indiana, on June 11.
The two pardons come a week after Mr. Bush approved the execution of Oliver Cruz, a convicted rapist and murderer deemed mentally retarded by defense psychologists.
When Bill Clinton approved the execution of a mentally incompetent Arkansas killer in 1992, no comedian would have touched the story with a barge pole.
There was incontrovertible proof that Kesselring had approved the execution of the OSS commandos and had subsequently concealed evidence of that act.
Eight years ago Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas, flew home in the midst of his presidential campaign to approve the execution of a man so brain-damaged that he saved the dessert from his final meal to eat later.
Clinton twice vetoed legislation that would have banned late-term abortion, and famously interrupted his election campaign in 1992 to approve the execution of a mentally incapacitated prisoner in Arkansas.
He has also approved the execution of a man whose lawyer suffered from mental illness and was repeatedly disciplined; a man involved in a fatal robbery who did not kill the victim; and a man who was 17 at the time of a murder and received clemency recommendations from the trial judge and several legislators.
