The US Attorney General, Mr John Ashcroft, vowed yesterday not to delay Timothy McVeigh's June 11th execution, saying nothing in 4,000 pages of newly-discovered FBI documents casts any doubt about the Oklahoma City bomber's guilt or his death sentence.
"June 11th is the date on which the execution will be carried out," he told a news conference as he released a report which he said showed the documents, only recently given to defence lawyers, contained nothing to question McVeigh's guilt.
On May 11th, just five days before McVeigh had been scheduled to die by lethal injection, Mr Ashcroft delayed his execution by 30 days after the FBI said it discovered 3,100 pages of documents that had not been provided to defence lawyers during the discovery phase of his 1997 trial.
"The first delay of this case was necessary for this review [of the FBI documents] by lawyers for the defence and the prosecution," Mr Ashcroft said. "A second delay in this case would ignore the evidence and the facts in the case.
"The American people can have confidence that all documents now have been identified and produced and that nothing in any of these documents undermines McVeigh's admission of the murder of 168 of his fellow American citizens or nothing in these documents undermines the justice of his sentence," he added.
McVeigh is on death row at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.