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By Jack Nichols
Cal Rerucha, prosecutor in Wyoming's Matthew Shepard murder trial, has given advance notice, as required by state law, that he will seek the death penalty if and when suspects Russell Arthur Henderson and Aaron James McKinney, both 21, are found guilty of Shepard's murder.
The prosecutor gave no official reason for his decision. Wyoming law requires that a prosecutor make known to a defendant's lawyer any intention to invoke what is considered the state's most extreme form of punishment.
In the wake of Shepard's death, the social sadism stemming from anti-gay hate-mongering has begun to get exposure on an unprecedented scale. The climate of hate indulged and encouraged by puritanical fundamentalist religionists who—on the airwaves-- regularly invoke the Leviticus death penalty for same-sex relations has now begun backfiring on the zealots. Wyoming's case is expected to show that Henderson and McKinney lured Matthew Shepard from a bar, claiming themselves to be gay. Then they tied him—arms spread crucifixion-style—to a rural fence where they taunted him with anti-gay "humor" and beat and tortured him. They left him to die, exposed to the cold. After slipping into a coma from which he never re-emerged, Shepard expired five days later in a Ft. Collins, Colorado hospital. His name and the circumstances under which he died are now known by both gay and straight observers-- worldwide. |
