DATE: Tuesday, April 8, 1997                TAG: 9704080001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B10  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   59 lines

AN ORDERLY START JUDGE RICHARD MATSCH HAS STRICKLY FORBIDDEN LAWYERS FROM DISCUSSING THE CASE PUBLICLY.

The slow, deliberate process of seating a panel of jurors who will decide if Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing two years ago began last week in a courtroom in Denver. If the early pace holds true, it could be weeks before 12 jurors and six alternates are chosen and actual testimony begins.

U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch has shown signs through the pretrial process and the screening of jurors that he intends to do all he can to keep this emotional, high-profile case focused on the facts and to have its merits decided within the walls of his courtroom, not in the the broad avenues of public opinion. He has strictly forbidden lawyers from discussing the case publicly, thus removing the courthouse steps as a mini-cam venue for competing prosecution and defense teams to spin their tactics and strategies.

The meticulous questioning of jurors has been so low-key that in Oklahoma City, where victims and their families fought hard for a closed-circuit television facility from which to view the distant event, the viewers have numbered in the dozens, not the hundreds for whom preparations had been made. Those numbers will swell, certainly, when witnesses begin to take the stand.

It is good that the process is off to an orderly start. High-profile cases in the United States over recent years have left us with an unsettling feeling that something is askew in the justice system. Police officers who pummelled Rodney King were cleared in a state court, only to be convicted later of federal civil-rights violations. O.J. Simpson survived a mountain of damning evidence in his criminal trial, only to be found responsible for a double-homicide in a follow-up civil action.

Each case left both sides with a bitter aftertaste for the judicial process, a sense that no trial is over until each side has gotten its pound of flesh.

And there are certain to be difficult days ahead in the McVeigh trial. Already, with questions about the efficacy of the FBI laboratory's work on the evidence, it is clear that we will see a replay of aspects of the successful Simpson defense: Cast a shadow over one leaf of the evidence and hope that the jurors believe the whole vine of proof is wilting in the shade.

Also, as an echo of the vague ``drug-dealers-did-it'' premise in the Simpson case, McVeigh's lawyers have said they might hint that a conspiracy of international terrorists - as yet unidentified - blew up the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, for reasons not yet clear. An ``Oliver Stone'' defense is not such a hopeless tactic in a nation where polls have shown that 10 percent of the adult population believes that the moon landings were a hoax.

As the pre-testimony wheels turn slowly in this case, there is still time for one final gesture that could revive a sense of respect for the American criminal-justice system: Those representatives of the government of Italy who have been proclaiming throughout the world that Joseph O'Dell was railroaded to death row through a Virginia Beach murder trial should be invited to sit in at the closed-circuit venue and watch the Timothy McVeigh trial unfold.

It might convince them that although this trial is being held in Denver, our system of justice, imperfect as it may be, is hardly a Wild West show that tramples the rights of the accused.

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