Matthew Shepard and the law that took 11 years

Matthew Shepard was 21, a University of Wyoming student who weighed barely over 100 pounds. On the night of October 6, 1998, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson lured him out of the Fireside Lounge in Laramie. They drove him to a fence on the edge of town, robbed and pistol-whipped him, and left him tied there in near-freezing cold.

A cyclist found him roughly 18 hours later. At first he thought he was looking at a scarecrow. Shepard never regained consciousness and died on October 12 at a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado.

The legal outcomes came fast. Henderson pleaded guilty on April 5, 1999, to felony murder and kidnapping. Prosecutors agreed to drop their pursuit of the death penalty, and he took two consecutive life sentences without parole.

McKinney went to trial. His lawyers tried a so-called gay panic defense, arguing that an alleged advance from Shepard sent him into a violent rage. The judge barred it. In November 1999, a jury convicted McKinney of felony murder.

Then, before the penalty phase could decide whether McKinney would die, Shepard's parents stepped in. Dennis Shepard stood up in court and asked that McKinney's life be spared. "Mr. McKinney, I give you life in the memory of one who no longer lives," he said. McKinney got two consecutive life terms. Both men are still in prison.

What the convictions couldn't touch was the hate underneath the killing. In 1998, federal hate-crime law covered crimes motivated by race, color, religion, and national origin. Sexual orientation and gender identity were nowhere in it. Wyoming had no state hate-crime statute at all.

That gap set off an 11-year fight in Congress. Advocates pushed to widen the federal statute. The bill stalled, session after session.

It finally passed by riding inside a defense spending bill. On October 28, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law. James Byrd Jr. was a Black man dragged to death behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, in 1998. The two names paired a racist murder with an anti-gay one.

The law added actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability to the categories of federally protected hate crimes. It also stripped out a requirement that a victim be engaged in a federally protected activity before the federal government could prosecute.

For Shepard, all of it came too late. The men who killed him were already serving life. The value of the law was forward-looking: a federal tool for cases where a state has no hate-crime law, or simply refuses to use the one it has.