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I’m warning you now, dear readers, that if you have a problem with hearing about senseless hate crimes, this post may not be for you.
Imagine for a moment that you were a young man, out for the night with a good friend of yours. You’re having a drink together at the Fireside Lounge in Laramie, Wyoming, and it is a little past midnight. Another young guy walks into the room, and he looks fairly cool, so you invite him over to join you and your friend. You find out interesting facts about him – he’s 21, he’s a student of the University of Wyoming, and he’s also gay. Oh.
But he seems friendly enough, and then you find out that his home is pretty far from the Lounge. You offer him a ride home, because you've got a car and it’s pretty late.
Imagine, then, if you didn't drive him to his home. Imagine if you and your friend instead drove to a rural area away from other people, and proceeded to beat, pistol whip, and torture this guy until he was unable to fight back. Imagine if you tied him to a fence and left him to die.
Imagine if, when the police picked you up with a bloody gun and the other guy’s wallet and shoes in your car, you could just say “he was gay, and coming on to me” and the judge and jury would say “oh, that’s understandable. We shall give you a shorter sentence because you were temporarily driven mad by a person of the same sex coming on to you”.
Now stop imagining. Unfortunately, you don’t need to imagine that this happened, because it is a true story. In 1998, Matthew Shepard (the man in the picture at the head of this post) met two guys in the Fireside Lounge. They seemed nice enough, and they were gay too! What do you know? So he accepted the offer of a lift home from them.
But Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the two men he met, had targeted him for a robbery. They pretended to be gay to gain his trust, to get him into their car, and then they attacked him. After beating him unconscious and tying him to the fence, Matthew spent eighteen hours before being found by a cyclist.
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| This was the fence that he was tied to (S) |
He suffered lacerations to the back of his head and in front of his right ear, and also received severe brain stem damage, along with numerous cuts across his head and neck. After the attack, Matthew never woke up. He was pronounced dead fourteen years ago today, on October 12th 1998, almost five days after he was first attacked.
For readers wondering about the little addition of the judge’s admission that it’s more acceptable to commit murder if the victim flirted with them (which, for those who are unsure, is never ok), that wasn't an exaggeration. The “gay panic” defence is a legal defence, usually against charges of assault or murder, stating that the aggressor only acted that way because of “homosexual panic” – a pseudo-psychiatric disorder in which someone that has received unwanted sexual advances from someone of the same sex cause them to go into a temporary psychotic state.
Essentially, “I was insecure enough in my sexuality that I felt threatened when someone flirted with me, so I killed them”.
Put it that way, it seems like a pretty idiotic defence, doesn't it? Apparently to some judges it’s not – it’s been used as recently as 2010 in the US by Vincent James McGee, who was charged with manslaughter rather than murder after he stabbed white supremacist Richard Barrett 35 times, and then stealing a wallet and a gun from the victim before setting fire to his body. The reason it was cited as manslaughter? The gay panic defence – McGee claimed that Barrett had propositioned him. I mean yes, Barrett was a racist and an all-around not that great a guy, but murder is murder. McGee was sentenced to a combined 65 years in prison, based on 20 years on the manslaughter charge, 20 years on the arson charge and 25 years on the burglary charge.
In Shepard’s case, thankfully, Judge Barton Voigt barred this strategy, saying that it was "in effect, either a temporary insanity defense or a diminished capacity defense, such as irresistible impulse, which are not allowed in Wyoming, because they do not fit within the statutory insanity defense construct."
Henderson later pleaded guilty on April 5th 1999, and agreed to testify against McKinney to avoid the death penalty. He was given two life sentences and, after finding McKinney guilty of felony murder, deliberated on the death penalty until Shepard’s parents agreed a deal for him to serve two consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole.
Justice, then. Or is it? You see, the “gay panic” defence overturned by the judge does still save some murderers from receiving the penalty that they are due, even now. Guidance given to counsel by the Crown Prosecution Service of England and Wales states: "The fact that the victim made a sexual advance on the defendant does not, of itself, automatically provide the defendant with a defence of self-defence for the actions that they then take," but at the same time a proficient defence may still make the excuse work for them.
Shepard’s death left a legacy, though. The murder was not classed as a hate crime, because crimes committed based on sexual orientation were not defined as hate crimes in Wyoming or federal law at the time. Since his murder, Wyoming tried to pass a bill defining attacks based on identity as hate crimes, but this failed to pass.
On the federal level, Bill Clinton attempted to extend federal hate crime legislation to include homosexuals and disabled people. This was rejected by the United States House of Representatives in 1999.
On March 20, 2007, the Matthew Shepard Act was introduced as federal bipartisan legislation in the U.S. Congress. The bill passed the House of Representatives on May 3, 2007. Similar legislation passed in the Senate on September 27, 2007; however President George W. Bush indicated he would veto the legislation if it reached his desk. The amendment was dropped by the Democratic leadership because of opposition from conservative groups and President George Bush, and because the measure being attached to a defence bill there was a lack of support from antiwar Democrats.
The House passed the Matthew Shepard Act, by a vote of 249 to 175 in 2009. The bill was introduced in the Senate on April 28. The Matthew Shepard Act was adopted as an amendment to the measure that was previously dropped on July 15. On October 22, the act was passed by the Senate by a vote of 68-29. President Obama signed the measure into law on October 28, 2009.
It took them more than 11 years, but finally there was reassurance that if someone was attacked for their orientation or gender identity, their attack would actually be known as a hate crime. It was an important victory for the LGBT community. It's both terrible and heartbreaking that Matthew Shepard had to pay the highest price before the legal world could see the flaws of logic in what they were saying.
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