DENVER—A Utah lawyer has lost his bid to interview Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols.
The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday reversed a lower court order allowing Jesse Trentadue to interview Nichols and David Paul Hammer, a death row acquaintance of Timothy McVeigh’s.
Trentadue, of Salt Lake City, said he’s trying to learn more about how his brother, Kenneth, died while in federal custody in the months after the 1995 bombing, which killed 168.
Jesse Trentadue sought FBI records to further his claim that his brother, a convicted bank robber who was picked up on a parole violation, was mistaken for an associate of McVeigh’s and killed in an interrogation gone awry.
A three-judge appeals court panel agreed with the FBI, which argued the agency has complied with Trentadue’s Freedom of Information Act request. The court also said Nichols and Hammer have nothing to do with Trentadue’s records request.
Nichols is serving life for conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter. McVeigh was convicted of murder and executed.
In court documents, Trentadue alleged the FBI had an incentive to withhold documents because they show federal agents had knowledge of a plot to bomb the Alfred Murrah Building up to two weeks before the bombing. The FBI argued it had complied and that the court had no authority to order the agency to pour through thousands of documents as part of a “private investigation into terrorism.”
In its ruling, the appellate court said Trentadue “failed to show any possibility that the depositions of Nichols and Hammer would produce relevant evidence in this case.”
A judge in 2001 entered a $1.1 million judgment in favor of Kenneth Trentadue’s family for extreme emotional distress in the government’s handling of his death at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center in August 1995. Kenneth Trentadue’s death was ruled a suicide by hanging.
“We couldn’t prove the murder because of lack of a motive,” Trentadue said by phone Thursday. “Now I have my motive, and now it’s too late.”
Trentadue said testimony by Nichols and Hammer would have laid out details showing how his brother could have been mistaken for an associate of McVeigh’s.
