Tales from the 10th: Judge Matsch Podcast Part 2: Oklahoma City Bombing Trials

Tales from the 10th

Judge Richard P. Matsch (1930-2019) served as a United States District Judge for the District of Colorado from 1974 to 2019. He is best known for his service as the trial judge in charge of the criminal trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who were convicted in 1997 for their roles in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Second podcast episode:

In the second podcast episode, Judge Matsch discussed his work overseeing the United States v. McVeigh and United States v. Nichols criminal cases. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were charged with orchestrating the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Matsch sought to hold fair trials that respected both the interest of the people in Oklahoma harmed by the bombing of the federal building and also the rights of the criminal defendants.

Part of protecting the defendants’ rights included providing significant financial support for the defense teams. Matsch famously told participants: “This is not theater; this is a trial.”

McVeigh was convicted in 1997, sentenced to death, and executed in 2001 after an appeal of his conviction. Nichols was convicted in 1997 and sentenced to life in prison.

Judge Matsch explained how he dealt with public interest in the trial:

I stressed to everybody, this case is not about me. When I was first notified of this, the press got it; there was a demand that there be an opportunity to talk to me about it. So I stood out on the courthouse steps on that afternoon and answered a few questions, but that was the last time I ever met with the press. It was important to recognize, all right, this is a trial. We have a lot of trials. We're doing this as much as possible. It's just another trial.

When it comes to the trial itself, of course, the fundamental question is fairness and the ability to see the defendant sitting at defense table as a human being and not objectify this person as someone who has done some terrible crime.

But he also explained how he dealt at trial with the emotionally powerful evidence:

So in the Oklahoma City trials, I had the difficult problem of very emotional testimony from people in the building and relatives. That was heartbreaking. One of the most emotional parts of that case was that right there in the front of that building was a nursery, a daycare center, and all those children were killed, including babies. And we had, of course, a lot of visualization of the scene. We had as evidence the initial response. All of this was relevant to the size of the explosive device and what it, what the principal components were. Because the connection--one of the connections here, and particularly Terry Nichols, was the ammonium phosphate fertilizer, as being the major component of the bomb, which was, a series of barrels connected with ammonium nitrate, fuel oil, and other. So, I took the position that the impact, the nature of the building, and all that was relevant to the structure of the bomb.