Court Rules Against Lawyer Who Donated Bombing Documents

The United States Tax Court ruled that a lawyer who represented the convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was not eligible to receive a charitable contribution tax deduction for the thousands of trial documents he donated to the University of Texas in 1997.

Stephen Jones led the defense of Mr. McVeigh, who was accused of detonating a bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168 people.

In 1997, Mr. Jones arranged to donate some 170 boxes of photocopied documents that the FBI and other federal agencies had provided him during the trial to the Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin.

An appraiser hired by Mr. Jones valued the collection of documents at $294,877, and Mr. Jones claimed a deduction for that amount on the 1997 joint tax return he filed along with his wife, Sherrel Jones.

The Tax Court ruled this month, however, that under Oklahoma law, an lawyer only has “custodial possession” of a client’s case files. The deduction was therefore invalid since Mr. Jones didn’t possess clear ownership of materials, the court said.

Mr. McVeigh was executed for his crimes in 2001.