Word: mckinney
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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SENTENCED. AARON MCKINNEY, 22, high school dropout; to two consecutive life sentences without parole; for the 1998 murder, kidnapping and robbery of gay college student Matthew Shepard; in Laramie, Wyo. Matthew's parents--who interceded as the jury began to deliberate--spared him the death penalty in exchange for his promise never to appeal...
...aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder last October played out - culminating Thursday with the sentencing of Aaron McKinney to two life sentences - an equally disgusting crime was committed in Arkansas, where two men raped and killed a 13-year-old boy. That incident received relatively little coverage, while Shepard leaves a story that will probably endure for years to come as a symbol of intolerance and lowest-common-denominator conformity...
...lynched - taken from a bar, beaten and left to die because he was the vilified "other," whom society has often cast as an acceptable target of abuse; Dirkhising was just "another" to a pair of deviants. And while child abuse is unfortunately no big news, lynching still is. Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were not satisfying some animalistic sexual impulse, they were bullies who gratuitously killed someone out of hate for being different than they were. It wasn't about them, it was about Matthew Shepard. Because they dramatically reflected some of society's darkest influences - an acceptance...
Shepard was the gay college student from the University of Wyoming who was murdered a year ago this month in Laramie. After leaving a bar together, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson drove Shepard to a deserted field, beat him savagely, tied him to a wooden fence and left him exposed overnight. A cyclist who found the bloody body the next day mistook it for a scarecrow...
Back in Laramie, arguments began in Aaron McKinney's murder trial this week. McKinney's lawyers chose the familiar "homosexual panic" defense, portraying Shepard as a sexual predator who licked McKinney's ear and touched his genitals. Enraged and frightened, his lawyers said, McKinney responded with brutal violence, beating the slender college student over and over with the butt of a gun. In at a summit in Lynchburg, Jerry Falwell vowed to help keep such violence from ever occurring again. For Matthew Shepard, the minister's promise comes too late. But that promise--contradictory, halting, uncertain, well-intentioned and human...