Convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh has found a reason to live, his attorneys say. That reason presumably involves further humiliation for the U.S. government over the fact that the FBI could not properly manage documents related to the most important case in anyone’s memory.

His new lease on life relates closely to his former reason for wanting to die. His goal is to manipulate public opinion so that more and more people question whether the government is doing the right thing. Unfortunately, the FBI has given him some wiggle room. Prosecutors and judges understand the potential for political disaster if a startling revelation comes a day too late.

No one believes there are any dramatic revelations to be had. McVeigh has confessed to the bombing, and it’s difficult to imagine that his attorneys wouldn’t have searched diligently for any exculpatory evidence he had told them might exist. We haven’t heard any credible allegations that the FBI withheld anything of great value.

The point that many people are missing, though, is that this information is much more useful to McVeigh and his attorneys because his is a capital case. If McVeigh had been sentenced to a lifetime of being warehoused in relative anonymity in a federal penitentiary, rather than to die by lethal injection last month, this new information would be only more paperwork for attorneys to review while his long sentence ground on. Instead, the existence of information previously unknown to his attorneys — regardless of how trivial those files might be — has given him additional power as a symbol of the failings of the government.

McVeigh will not go free, but short of that, he seems to win either way. When the federal government finally manages to execute him, he will be a martyr for people who believe in a particularly disturbing cause. For the time, however brief, that he manages to avoid that fate, he will have manipulated our criminal justice system to help him make the point he’d had in mind all along: Not only is the government of the United States of America fallible, it’s too frequently inept.

Punishment should be swift and sure, and the death penalty is neither. Appeals extend nearly endlessly, at monumental expense that often exceeds the cost of a life sentence. Victims suffer through years of court proceedings when what they truly need is closure. Justice gets bogged down in petty details.

A defendant’s guilt or innocence is hardly petty, particularly when his crime is as horrific as McVeigh’s. Again, though, we cannot forget that he has confessed not only to blowing up 168 people but to taking pride in doing so. The issue here isn’t guilt, it’s efficacy. The justice system is ours to use in punishing criminals, not McVeigh’s to use in torturing the American people.