NEW YORK — Nobody expected Timothy McVeigh, the deadliest mass murderer in American history, to become a poster child for opposition to the death penalty.

But after the FBI admitted that it had failed to turn more than 3,000 documents over to defense attorneys, New York Post columnist Rod Dreher began to reconsider his staunch support of capital punishment.

Dreher, a Catholic, had always argued against those who believed the death penalty to be vengeful or unnecessary.

He said, “For years I had doubts” that all the prisoners on death row were guilty, “but the anger I feel at murderers and the compassion I feel for victims gave me a more emotional response.”

The McVeigh mess, coming only weeks after revelations that sloppy expert testimony from an Oklahoma City forensic chemist may have convicted scores of innocent men, shook Dreher. On May 15, he wrote a column describing what he now calls his partial conversion to the anti-death penalty ranks.

Dreher couldn't understand how the FBI could botch such a high-profile, high-stakes case. Although none of the newly revealed documents are thought to cast doubt on McVeigh's guilt — especially since McVeigh has confessed to the Oklahoma City bombing — many people have suggested that if the nation's judicial elite can blunder in their most public case, lower-profile capital cases may be botched as well.

Dreher said that his views on capital punishment began to shift further after he wrote the column: “I picked up a copy of Evangelium Vitae,” Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the “Gospel of life.”

He said, “John Paul II says in Evangelium Vitae that no human being, not even a murderer, loses the dignity that comes with being a human. Somehow the power of his words struck me in a way they hadn't before.”

Dreher added, “It's very hard for me to have compassion for Timothy McVeigh or any other murderer, but I can live with knowing that they'll be in jail for the rest of their lives. I can't live with knowing that in order to execute them, to bring them that justice, we have to have a system” in which innocent men are mistakenly executed.

Dreher said that he now supports the abolition of the death penalty in the U.S. He said, “I believe the Pope is right: As long as we as a society can protect the commonweal without resorting to bloody means, we should do it.”

Death Penalty ‘Dissenters’

Supporters of capital punishment responded that no one now known to be innocent has been executed since the U.S. Supreme Court revoked its ban on the death penalty in 1976. But Dreher said, “I think that may simply be a matter of time. I'm from Louisiana and I know that black people there, until very recent times, could not even begin to hope to get a fair trial.”

He noted that after forensic chemist Joyce Gilchrist's testimony was exposed as unreliable, Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating ordered a review of every felony conviction that was based on Gilchrist's testimony. One man has already been cleared of a rape charge and released from prison; 12 prisoners on death row may owe their convictions to her, along with 11 who have already been executed. “I'll bet they're frightened of what they're going to find,” Dreher said.

Keating, a Catholic, supports the death penalty and has presided over more than 20 executions. Mike Brake, a spokesman for the governor, said that in the Gilchrist cases reviewed so far, “No indication has arisen in any of those cases that Gilchrist's testimony was central to the conviction,” a claim some reporters following the cases have disputed.

Christopher Thacker, a Catholic convert who works at a Washington, D.C., organization that deals with various policy issues, said that the McVeigh case had only strengthened his support of the death penalty. He called execution “the only just punishment for some crimes.”

He added, “With the modern state of forensic science, it is less likely now than ever before that an innocent person will be convicted of a capital crime. The state has to be free to administer just punishments when guilt can be ascertained ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’” as in McVeigh's case.

Thacker agreed with Dreher that Catholics must worry “that the poor and disadvantaged are more likely to be subject to the death penalty than wealthy individuals who commit the same crime.” But he said that this poses a challenge to the judicial system as a whole, not to the death penalty.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against an unjust aggressor” (No. 2267).

The catechism's treatment of capital punishment concludes, “Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm

… the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

Dreher Strikes a Nerve

Several readers wrote to Dreher after his column appeared to recount similar changes of heart over the death penalty. Dreher noted, “I got a call today from a friend of mine, a New York police detective and a very strong Catholic. He [said], ‘I've seen it in my own work. You take mug shots to people, ask them to identify them. They say that's the one who did it, and it turns out he wasn't anywhere near the place.’”

Brian Oglesby, a North Carolina defense attorney, wrote to Dreher in agreement. He told the Register that he first began to oppose the death penalty after he began work as a lawyer. “I have personally witnessed mistakes occur in criminal cases which led to an individual being incarcerated but which were later remedied,” he said. “I have seen what happens [in low-profile cases] and it is no prettier than the McVeigh case.” But with the death penalty, he said, mistakes can't be fixed.

Furthermore, he cited a belief in “limited government,” which he said should prevent “giving the government the ultimate power to kill its citizens, even those who commit very serious crimes.”

Dreher concluded that even if his own child were killed, “Even though my heart will be screaming out for the blood of this murderer” he hoped he would not seek the death penalty. He added, “Think about how much of our demand for justice is really a demand for vengeance. That's what it was for me.”