the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt eight)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Jones, Coyne, and others on the defense team indulged McVeigh for months regarding the necessity defense. They researched the use of the defense in the United States and even around the world and wrote detailed memos on the subject. They all reached the same conclusion. As Coyne put it in one memo, “there was no way a court would allow the issue to go to the jury to balance the evils” between Waco and Oklahoma City. Amber McLaughlin, one of Jones’s Enid firm alums, wrote a thirteen-page memo that concluded, “The limitations of the defenses of necessity and duress will prevent us from being able to assert either one of them at trial.” The handful of cases where the defense had been successfully used explained why it was a nonstarter for McVeigh. For example, in a South Carolina case from 1991, a defendant was convicted of driving with a suspended license when he went to call for help for his wife, who was pregnant and experiencing intestinal distress. He had no telephone at home. The appeals court overturned his conviction because the trial court forbade him from raising a necessity defense. To invoke the defense, the court said, the defendant must reasonably believe that there was an imminent threat and that he had no realistic alternative to the action that he took. Moreover, the defendant’s behavior must create no more substantial danger than the situation he is attempting to address.

No lawyer could, with a straight face, argue that McVeigh had a “necessity” to bomb the Murrah building and kill 168 people in order to prevent future violence by the federal government. The argument was worse than nonsensical; it was offensive. The idea that Jones and his team even deigned to research the issue demonstrated the way they coddled and indulged McVeigh. The “necessity defense” episode illustrated how the intense public focus on the case invested McVeigh with a kind of celebrity status; as a result, his opinions, even on legal issues, had to be taken seriously. The vast number of lawyers on his team meant that every silly idea could be explored. In a normal case, even one involving the death penalty, a defendant raising such an idea would have been told to stop wasting his lawyer’s limited time.