Boston bomb jurors face tough task

Two decades have passed since Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb outside a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, but the memory remains vivid for Tonya McCabe, who sat on the jury that sentenced him to die.

“I still want to think the best of people, but there is a part of me that was changed,” said McCabe, who was 24 in 1997 when Gulf War veteran McVeigh was sentenced to death. “That natural instinct I had to think that people had the best intentions; after the trial, I didn’t feel that way anymore.”

Jury members in the Boston Marathon bombing trial may be in for a similarly formative experience on Monday. That’s when they will begin their formal deliberations over whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is guilty of killing three people and injuring 264 at the race’s finish line on April 15, 2013, and fatally shooting a police officer three days later.