Oklahoma City Bombing Victim’s Father Says Executions are Not Part of the Healing Process

Bud Welch, father of Julie Welch who was killed in the Oklahoma City Bombing, recent­ly appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, just a few days before the 15^th anniver­sary of the bomb­ing in Oklahoma. Welch, who is the pres­i­dent of Murder Victims’ Familes for Human Rights, has been a long-time oppo­nent of the death penal­ty and has said that exe­cu­tions are more often ​“staged polit­i­cal events” instead of a part of the heal­ing process for vic­tims. When asked how he came to oppose the death peal­ty for Timothy McVeigh, Welch told Maddow, ​“I reached that point prob­a­bly about a year after the bomb­ing — close to a year. All my life, I had always opposed the death penal­ty. I just thought it was some­thing that soci­ety should not be doing. And after Julie‘s death, I was so full of revenge and hate that I had to get ret­ri­bu­tion in some way. So I was for the death penal­ty prob­a­bly for the first year. And after rec­og­niz­ing that killing Tim McVeigh was not part of my heal­ing process, then I was able to move for­ward.” Read the full tran­script of the inter­view here.

(The Interview, The Rachel Maddow Show, April 16, 2010). See also Victims.