DON'T MESS WITH RICHARD MATSCH

Judge Richard Matsch is nothing if not precise. He starts his court at 9 a.m. sharp. No one gets into the courtroom after he walks in, between 8:59:40 and 8:59:50 a.m. Absolutely. Cross him, and you will have a tale to tell. "He's virtually always the brightest person sitting in that room," says Larry Pozner, a Denver attorney and a vice president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "In Denver, if you're going to be a federal trial lawyer, one stage is to be yelled at by Judge Matsch." Says Pozner: "I've also seen agents of the Federal Government deeply regret they have come up short."

"What's the objection?" Matsch growled, when prosecutor Joseph Hartzler raised one amid the Oklahoma-bombing proceedings. At mid-sentence, Matsch cut him off: "There is no basis in that! Overruled!" Hartzler offered no challenge. Says Bob Miller, a Denver lawyer: "He doesn't allow the government to wear the white hat." While Matsch has allowed McVeigh's defense a number of procedural victories, the judge remains tough with Jones and his associates. During jury selection, he berated a defense lawyer, calling his questioning "incomprehensible." The judge, who lost a daughter in a freak accident in 1992, has not gone out of his way to accommodate the families of the victims--acceding to requests for closed-circuit television coverage only after President Clinton signed a law specifically tailored to give them that right.

The son of a Burlington, Iowa, grocer, Matsch, 66, was appointed to the federal bench by Richard Nixon in 1974, and has presided over cases ranging from school desegregation to murder by extremist groups. He and his wife Elizabeth do not socialize much, and, apparently to avoid conflicts of interest, he often eats alone at law conventions. However, he is devoted to at least two things: his alma mater, the University of Michigan, and his hero, Atticus Finch, the small-town white lawyer assigned the unpopular task of defending a black man against rape charges in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Finch does so fervently but loses the case. Matsch describes Finch as "the opponent of oppression, the paradigm of propriety, the dean of decent citizens and the core of his community." Those are the strict ideals Matsch expects his court to live up to.

--By Patrick E. Cole/Denver