Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh has decided to abandon his legal battle against his execution in the wake of the two defeats handed him by US courts in recent days, his lawyers said late last night.
"Mr McVeigh doesn't want to proceed any further in legal action in order to stop his execution," the 33-year-old's attorney Rob Nigh told reporters here.
The announcement came shortly after a federal appeals court here denied his request for a stay.
That denial, McVeigh's second judicial disappointment in two days appears to have reconciled the bomber to his fate. Nigh said McVeigh wanted to use the time remaining before his June 11th execution to prepare for his death by lethal injection.
The bomber's legal team had sought to exploit the opportunity afforded them by the discovery - within the last month - that the FBI had failed to turn over evidence to McVeigh's legal team prior to his 1997 trial.
His lawyers had argued that their client had been denied "due process," and that they needed more time to review the thousands of pages of documents.
But neither federal judge Richard Matsch, who presided over McVeigh's original trial, or a three-judge panel from the 10th US Court of Appeals were convinced by that argument.
And although McVeigh could have pursued his battle to the US Supreme Court, it would have been a legal battle with diminishing returns, noted professor Steven Lubet of Northwestern University's School of Law in Chicago.
"His chances fall at every succeeding stage," said Lubet.
"Not only is it very hard to get the attention of the US Supreme Court, but there's a reluctance to overturn the lower courts' decisions, partly because there's a presumption that they had more time to consider the matter."
AFP