BLOG / NOVEMBER 9, 2017
Voices: Richard Burr remembers Rob Nigh
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“We have lost one of the best among us, but each day when we do
something good for a client, we are renewing our connection with Rob.”
Death penalty attorney Richard Burr wrote those words to the
defense community in late September, shortly after his close friend, defense
attorney Rob Nigh, died at the age of 57.
Burr and Nigh were two of the three attorneys who initially
represented Timothy McVeigh in his murder trial for the bombing of the Alfred
P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.
“We immediately liked each other. We worked as closely as people
can when they represent someone,” Burr says. “We had an immediate connection on
very deep levels as lawyers. We had great respect for each other’s skills,
insight, abilities. We developed a very deep friendship very quickly.”
To call it a huge case would be an understatement. McVeigh was
accused of loading the back of a Ryder truck with 5,000 pounds of explosives,
driving it to the front of the Murrah Federal Building, where there was a
daycare center on the second floor, and detonating the bomb. It destroyed half
of the building and killed 168 people, 19 of them children, and injured 684
others. It is still the worst act of domestic terrorism perpetrated in U.S.
history.
“When I first heard of the bombing, my initial instinct was
whoever represents this young man has got to figure out how to relate to all
these people who were hurt,” Burr says. “When I was asked to come on to the
case, I carried that with me. But many of the other members of the team were
ambivalent. Their experience was that the defense is an adversary of the
victims. Rob was the only one who felt the same way I did. We saw the magnitude
of the loss, and decided we had to figure out a way to respond as human beings,
and not be restricted to the traditional role of defense lawyers.”
To help them figure out how to “work within the framework of
representing their client, and being good advocates for him, while continuing
to be respectful of the victims and victims’ family members,” Burr and Nigh
invited Howard Zehr, “the grandfather of restorative justice,” to conduct a
three-day colloquium for the attorneys. On the Eastern Mennonite University
website where Zehr is a co-director of the Zehr Institute for Restorative
Justice, he is described as “an early advocate of making the needs of victims
central to the practice of restorative justice.”
It was a theme that resonated deeply with Nigh, Burr says, because
of his listening skills, and his innate kindness – he had
the “ability to listen without judgment. That’s a hard skill to develop
for any of us,” he says. “When most of us are listening, we’re thinking about
what we want to say. Rob didn’t do that. He just listened, to what was being
said and what wasn’t being said. That act of listening without judgment and
listening deeply is one of the most compassionate things we can do for each
other. Rob was the only non-death penalty person to be a part of the
experience. The rest of us were death penalty attorneys who were shaped by our
experiences, and while Rob didn’t have that, he still came to the case with the
same instincts we had.”
From the time of McVeigh’s arrest shortly after the bombing, until
his conviction and death sentence two years later, the case consumed the
defense team. None more so than Nigh.
“Rob became the person closest to Tim [McVeigh],” Burr says. “He
was the one Tim felt closest to. He was the one Tim wanted to have with him in
the execution chamber. And he was the one who took care of his remains after
the execution.”
Nigh and Burr and Mandy Welch (who was part of the original
defense team) appealed McVeigh’s conviction to the Tenth Circuit in June 1997,
but were denied. But they continued to visit McVeigh on death row. “We were
both very connected with Tim, and each other during that time,” Burr says.
They returned to the case just before his execution after the
government found 30 boxes of investigative materials that should have been
turned over to the defense, but their efforts to have the execution halted
failed. At McVeigh’s execution in June 2001, Nigh was in the execution chamber
and Burr was outside with the press. After it was over, Burr says Nigh came
out, and “made an eloquent statement.” Both continued to reach out to the
survivors and the victims’ family members, “and tried to find some meaning in
what had happened.”
Burr, and two of the other defense attorneys, including Welch and
Maurie Levin, tried to find that meaning by again working with Zehr and his
then-graduate student Tammy Krause, who had done victim outreach for the
defense team, by meeting with about 25 survivors of the bombing about a year
after the trial had ended. Burr says the victims asked questions about McVeigh
and “We answered them as best we could. There was a positive spirit all
around, all of us trying to learn from and with each other.”
From that experience came the practice of Defense-Initiated Victim
Outreach (DIVO), which Burr, Zehr, and Krause began using in federal capital
cases. DIVO eventually became part of many state cases, and Burr says it’s now
a “fairly routine practice in defending capital cases at trial.”
Nigh and Burr never worked together again after the McVeigh trial.
Burr went on to become a member of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Council,
often recommending Nigh for federal death penalty cases. He is now a death
penalty attorney in Texas. Nigh eventually became Tulsa County’s Chief Public
Defender in 2014 before stepping down after two-and-a-half years to return to
his previous law firm, and deal with health issues. He died September 24th.
The bond Nigh and Burr forged during the McVeigh trial endured.
“We never lost touch,” Burr says. “We talked by phone four or five times a
year. We just remained very close friends. It feels like he’s still with me.
He’s been with me for 22 years and I don’t see that that will change. We became
a part of each other.”
© 2017 Death Penalty Focus. All rights reserved.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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