So instead of a process designed to be as fair as might be, we now have a drama which dangerously enters into matters of surmise. McVeigh's audience and Ashcroft maintain, against all the evidence (a bad sign, to say the very least, in an Attorney General) that somehow they will be better off for having witnessed the retribution, that it will in some way heal them.

Even if they were right, is it a sound principle of justice that it should be so personalised? I think not.

One only has to remember the Dukakis blunder. The law exists as it does precisely to save every one of us from answering the question: "What if it were your child that had been murdered?" Recent events, fuelled by television coverage, have dangerously eroded that protection erected to save us from ourselves as well as to save victims from what we might do.

Ashcroft's permission to narrowcast the execution has plausible libertarian foundations. McVeigh and the relatives of his victims both want it. The proceeding will, we are told, be encrypted and only shown once without an archive copy being taken.

What reasons might there be for forbidding a consensual contract from being executed?

• First, while there might be justification for allowing a contract between McVeigh and the relatives of his victims that cannot include those who might have been victims; they are simply satisfying the vicarious cravings of their psyche.
  
  
• Secondly, the state need not be an agent for a contract between two parties if it chooses not to be. Why should public officials consent to a process just because citizens ask for it?
  
  
• Thirdly, in the final analysis neither McVeigh nor his audience have any rights in the case; Ashcroft has granted a privilege which he will regret if it is seen as a precedent. It is only a matter of time before a wrongly convicted person takes up the precedent and broadcasts to a stadium entered by ticket only. No matter how strong the encryption it is only a matter of time before the last words of the victim are resurrected as the case against him collapses retrospectively.

Kevin Carey

In a world of rising alienation, victimhood is a powerful bond, a goad to hysteria, a generator of synthetic empathy. Who shall say how far the murder of a man affects another? Who shall say how far the injury will spread?

As long as the law set bounds, kept the victims at the gate -- harsh though that might be -- it was, if reluctantly, accepted. As the line weakens, as television cascades over into thousands of Webcasts, not only the court room and the death chamber but the riot will all be part of the nightly show which passes for public information.

The McVeigh case also throws up a serious question about contract law. If public officials can countenance a mutually satisfactory arrangement between a mass murderer and some 200 people who claim some psychological proximity, then the sale of a small quantity of narcotics to a user is trivial by comparison.

What is it which allows a government to permit the former but forbid the latter? Presumably the answer has something to do with the state's notion of how far it should or can go to prevent people harming themselves. Viewed in that light, the Ashcroft decision may well come to be a landmark. There was no attempt here to save people from their worst inclinations; retribution was handed, so to speak, by proxy from the grim faced law to the vengeful representatives of the seething, not so silent, majority which, in turn, is not likely to stay silent if it thinks that there is more than a hint of pandering in the offing.

It is not only Ashcroft's immediate decision which must be a cause for concern, it is its downstream consequences which he has apparently not anticipated. At the risk of being accused of cowardice, inconsistency, partiality, prejudice or any other pejorative term in the lexicography of public criticism, next time he should refuse any such arrangements as those for McVeigh's execution. He should firmly draw a line and stick to it, regardless of the political embarrassment. The consequences of doing otherwise are almost too great to imagine.

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