DAVID LEESON FOR TIME

The victims' families were gathered, and so were the media, ready for the execution of Timothy McVeigh, whose 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal office building left 168 dead. The tension mounted, and then crashed: The FBI had misplaced more than 3,000 pages of documents relating to the McVeigh case. While McVeigh's guilt was not in question, procedural mores were, and a seething Attorney General John Ashcroft postponed the execution, as defense attorneys fell onto the newly-released papers, searching without much hope for a shred of evidence to save their client.
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