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Mountain road
When J.H. Hatfield fled New York's media frenzy last week, he made his way back home to the Ozarks, where a man's mistakes are his own damn business.
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Viva Iowa
Though the state's Latino population makes up less than 2 percent of its voters, the Bush campaign is wooing Iowa Hispanics.
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[10/25/99]

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[10/25/99]

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As baseball honors the team of the century at the World Series, the all-time hits leader banned for gambling proves he can't be exiled forever.
By Steve Kettmann
[10/25/99]

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McKinney, who is charged with first-degree murder, aggravated robbery and kidnapping, could face the death penalty. But Tangeman is trying to reduce the severity of the crime to second-degree murder or manslaughter, which would wipe out the threat of the death penalty.

Several observers had predicted the defense team might resort to a "gay panic" defense later in the trial, if it could not convince the jury that drugs and alcohol diminished McKinney's ability to understand the severity of the crimes he committed. But no one in the stunned courtroom seemed prepared for the risky defense outlined in Tangeman's opening statement. Nor were they prepared for the follow-up development: Tangeman argued that McKinney erupted "savagely" not because he was some sort of country hick who'd never crossed paths with a gay guy, but because of his own homosexual experiences.

At the age of 7, McKinney was forced to suck another boy's penis, Tangeman announced. "Aaron will tell you this humiliated him. He did carry it with him." At 15, McKinney willingly engaged in a homosexual act one time with a cousin, according to the lawyer. And not long before the murder, he inadvertently entered a gay church with his girlfriend and fled sobbing from the sight of men kissing.

Reaction from the gay community was swift and severe. Jeffrey Montgomery, spokesman for the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, staggered out of the courtroom, collapsed in a chair and gasped, "I'm almost speechless. I never thought they'd be so blatant." He said he'd observed more than a dozen "gay panic" defenses, including the "Jenny Jones" trial -- a highly publicized murder case using the controversial defense strategy, which suggests that a defendant is thrown into a panic by a sexual advance from a person of the same gender -- but had never seen any so extreme. "Everyone thought it was going to be subtle," he said. "He's put [Shepard] on trial. It's a scoundrel's defense, it's a bankrupt defense, but it's all they have left."

Tangeman also outlined a defense based on the fact that McKinney was under the influence of methamphetamines and alcohol; the jury could return a lesser verdict of second-degree murder or manslaughter if they found that he was too intoxicated to clearly understand his actions. Certainly McKinney was fueled by those chemicals, his lawyer argued, but the attack was unleashed by a sexual advance from Shepard that recalled a "haunted" and "sexually confusing" past and threw him into a blind rage.

Despite claims by the prosecution that McKinney and his friend Russell Henderson lured Shepard from the bar that night, Tangeman said he will call witnesses who will prove Shepard made the first advance. "Shepard was looking for some kind of sexual encounter with Aaron and Russell," the defense lawyer said. They agreed to leave together, and once in the truck, "Shepard reached over and grabbed [McKinney's] genitals and licked his ear."

"This humiliated him in front of his friend," Tangeman said.

Surprisingly, prosecutor Cal Rerucha's opening statement played down the hate-crime issue that has focused national attention on the Shepard case, framing the case as a simple robbery gone bad, which turned into a murder.

But Rerucha left the door open to argue that Shepard was targeted because of his sexual orientation, describing what McKinney told Shepard once the three were inside McKinney's truck: "We are not gay, and you're getting jacked." Rerucha offered no explanation as to whether the remark signaled the killers' motivation for the attack, or was perhaps a simple effort to intimidate someone they intended to rob.

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