[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 37, Number 24 (Monday, June 18, 2001)]
[Page 876]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on the Execution of Timothy McVeigh

June 11, 2001

    This morning the United States of America carried out the severest 
sentence for the gravest of crimes. The victims of the Oklahoma City 
bombing have been given not vengeance but justice. And one young man met 
the fate he chose for himself 6 years ago.
    For the survivors of the crime and for the families of the dead, the 
pain goes on. Final punishment of the guilty cannot alone bring peace to 
the innocent. It cannot recover the loss or balance the scales, and it 
is not meant to do so. Today every living person who was hurt by the 
evil done in Oklahoma City can rest in the knowledge that there has been 
a reckoning.
    At every point, from the morning of April 19, 1995, to this hour, we 
have seen the good that overcomes evil. We saw it in the rescuers who 
saved and suffered with the victims. We have seen it in a community that 
has grieved and held close the memory of the lost. We have seen it in 
the work of detectives, marshal, and police, and we've seen it in the 
courts. Due process ruled: The case was proved; the verdict was calmly 
reached; and the rights of the accused were protected and observed to 
the full and to the end. Under the laws of our country, the matter is 
concluded.
    Life and history bring tragedies, and often they cannot be 
explained. But they can be redeemed. They are redeemed by dispensing 
justice, though eternal justice is not ours to deliver. By remembering 
those who grieve, including Timothy McVeigh's mother, father, and 
sisters, and by trusting in purposes greater than our own, may God in 
his mercy grant peace to all--to the lives that were taken 6 years ago, 
to the lives that go on, and to the life that ended today.

Note: The President spoke at 9:44 a.m. in the James S. Brady Briefing 
Room at the White House. Timothy McVeigh was tried, found guilty, and 
sentenced to death for the murder of 168 people in the April 19, 1995, 
bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK.