Jesse Dirkhising
Encyclopedia
Jesse William Dirkhising (May 24, 1986 – September 26, 1999), also known as Jesse Yates, was an American teenager from Prairie Grove
, Arkansas
, who was bound, drugged, torture
d, rape
d, and died as a result of the drugs given him and the position in which he was tied down
..
Dirkhising's death received only regional media coverage until a Washington Times article ran a story nearly a month after his death, noting the lack of national coverage in contrast to that given to the 1998 death of Matthew Shepard
. The Shepard murder was approaching its first anniversary and as such was getting another round of national attention coupled with updates on pending hate crime legislation. Prompted by coverage in the Washington Times, the Dirkhising case gained notoriety as conservative commentators compared media coverage of the two cases and explored the issues of what was considered a hate crime
. The added attention resulted in mainstream
media also reporting the Dirkhising case in relation to the coverage of the Shepard case, with many attempting to explain why the two were handled differently by the media, and perhaps received differently by readers.
The media coverage of the Dirkhising case was repeatedly and consistently contrasted with that of the high-profile Shepard case, although the cases were dissimilar in several important details. While both victims died as the result of assaults by two men, Dirkhising was a minor and the victim of a sex crime, while Shepard, an adult, was murdered as part a robbery gone south. While homosexuality has been cited as an issue in both cases, the circumstances were different and in contrast: Shepard was an openly gay
man who was attacked by two heterosexual men, while Dirkhising was raped by two men who were described as "lovers" in a police affidavit.
. At the time of his death, he was aged 13 and was in the seventh grade. David Carpenter, who was charged with his murder, was then 38, and lived about 30 miles away in a "small but booming northwest Arkansas town" called Rogers. Joshua Macave Brown, 22, shared Carpenter's apartment. Carpenter managed a beauty salon and was a friend of Dirkhising's parents. Dirkhising had stayed with the two men at their apartment on weekends for two months prior to his death. Brown, who had been sexually molesting Dirkhising for two months prior his death, claimed that Dirkhising was a willing participant. The child's family had been told he was helping out at the salon.
when they responded to a 911
call. They went to the home of David Carpenter, where Joshua Brown was also present. Police found that Dirkhising had been tied to a mattress and that his ankles, knees, and wrists had been bound with duct tape
and belts. Dirkhising had been gagged with his own underwear, a bandana
and duct tape. According to police, he had also been drugged. Police determined that Dirkhising had been repeatedly raped over a period of several hours. It was later revealed that over a two-day period Dirkhising had been repeatedly raped and sodomized with various objects. After the men took a break to eat, Brown noticed Dirkhising was not breathing and alerted Carpenter, who attempted to resuscitate
the boy, then called 911. Dirkhising later died in hospital, his death hastened apparently as the result of positional asphyxia
.
Police found in Carpenter's home material of a pedophile
nature, including instructions on how to sedate a child, and a diagram of how to tie up and position the boy, as well as other notes of fantasies of molesting children. It was speculated that one of the men planned the assault and the other carried it out. The Arkansas
State Police recorded in their affidavit a statement by Brown that he had been molesting Dirkhising for at least two months prior to Dirkhising's death. Brown called the molestation 'horseplay' and claimed that Dirkhising was a willing participant. According to age of consent
laws in Arkansas, Dirkhising was incapable of giving informed consent
for sexual activity.
Brown also later claimed he himself was "under the influence of methamphetamine
" when talking with his arresting officers.
ran the story on its local wires but not nationally until a month later when the story was focused on the lack of coverage rather than the crime itself. A LexisNexis
search revealed only a few dozen articles that appeared only after the Washington Times story on the lack of coverage on October 22, 1999, a month after Dirkhising's death.
, a media watchdog group that frequently criticizes "liberal bias," as saying, "Nobody wants to say anything negative about homosexuals. Nobody wants to be seen on the wrong side of that issue." Brent Bozell, media critic and director of the Media Research Center
, accused the media of deliberately spiking the story. Bozell wrote, "Had he been openly gay and his attackers heterosexual, the crime would have led all the networks. But no liberal media outlet has as its villains two gay men."
After the Washington Times article, the lack of coverage of Dirkhising's case was noted by conservative commentators and was attributed to the homosexuality
of the perpetrators as well as the nature of the crimes. Conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan
noted that showing gay men as sadistic barbarians does not fit the "villain-victim script of our cultural elite."
The Dirkhising case was repeatedly compared with the media coverage of the murder of Matthew Shepard
although Dirkhising was a minor in a sex crime and Shepard's murder was a hate crime involving adults. Also the sexualities of the victims and attackers differed somewhat with Shepard being an openly
gay man attacked by two heterosexual men, while Dirkhising's attackers were lovers and presumed to be gay.
Jonathan Gregg wrote in Time, "Matthew Shepard died not because of an all-too-common sex crime, but because of prejudice. Essentially, Shepard was 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."
In the month after Shepard's murder, LexisNexis
recorded 3,007 stories about his death compared with only 46 in the month after the Dirkhising murder. However, once the media seized on the story, this count rapidly rose into the thousands. Many of the articles justified the lack of coverage, citing that the death did not justify national attention; initial reports failed to mention that the two perpetrators were gay
, whereas the Shepard reports identified Shepard as gay and the crimes as hate crimes from the beginning. In a November 4, 1999, Time
magazine article, Jonathan Gregg opined that accusations of liberal
media bias were not justified because the two cases varied with the Dirkhising murder offering "no lessons," whereas the Shepard murder "touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons."
wrote an article in The New Republic
accusing the liberal media of political correctness
and using Dirkhising's death to attack the Human Rights Campaign
for its support of hate-crime legislation. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) also complained that the Washington Times "omitted a key piece of information" for its front-page story on Dirkhising. The HRC had provided a statement strongly condemning the crime and called for the perpetrators to be punished "to the fullest extent of the law." Sullivan also criticized some aspects of the conservative coverage of the Dirkhising case equating gay sex with child molestation as "ugly nonsense". Sullivan squarely summed up the differences in media coverage as being due to political interests. Sullivan stated that whereas the Shepherd case was used to support including LGBT
people in federal hate-crime law the Dirkhising case was ignored for concerns of inciting anti-gay prejudice
. In November 1999, E.R. Shipp
, ombudsman
at The Washington Post
, noted that "readers, prodded by commentators who are hostile to LGBT
people and to what they view as a 'liberal' press" had raised questions about the Dirkhising case. Shipp said, however, that she "made a clear distinction" between the Dirkhising and Shepard cases: "Matthew Shepard’s death sparked public expressions of outrage that themselves became news. . . . That Jesse Dirkhising’s death has not done so is hardly the fault of the Washington Post." Shipp also noted that the Shepherd story was newsworthy because of the debate it fostered on hate crimes and the level of intolerance towards LGBT people in the United States.
The story of the September 26 death was transmitted by Associated Press national news wires on October 29, and the Post ran a news brief the following day.
Jonathan Gregg, in a November 9 Time
magazine editorial, asserted that "[the killing of Dirkhising] was the kind of depraved act that happens with even more regularity against young females and, indeed if the victim had been a 13-year-old girl, the story would probably never have gotten beyond Benton County, much less Arkansas. The same editorial also said: "A red herring worth addressing at the outset is the failure to distinguish between homosexuality and pedophilia, which creates a false parallel at the core of the Washington Times argument. But sex with children is a crime regardless of the sexes involved, and is not synonymous with homosexuality. . . . "The reason the Dirkhising story received so little play is [that] it offered no lessons. Shepard's murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons. "Jesse Dirkhising's death gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men."
from Benton County citing excessive pretrial publicity. "It's been on everyone's lips down here for a month and a half," Buckley stated. The Washington Post was "almost alone among national newspapers" reporting on Brown's trial and Fox News
was the only network to cover the murder trial and conviction. The prosecutors "argued that Jesse suffocated to death during the sexual assault because of a combination of the drugs and the way he was trussed up." In March 2001, Brown was found guilty of first-degree murder and rape. He was sentenced to life in prison, and this sentence was upheld on appeal
by the Arkansas Supreme Court in September 2003. In April 2001, Carpenter pleaded guilty to similar charges and was also sentenced to life. Subsequently, Carpenter said on the Fox News Channel
that Brown was solely responsible for the rape and murder of Dirkhising while Brown said that Carpenter was the director.
Prairie Grove, Arkansas
Prairie Grove is a city in Washington County, Arkansas, United States. The population was 2,540 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Fayetteville–Springdale–Rogers, AR-MO Metropolitan Statistical Area. Located here is the Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park...
, Arkansas
Arkansas
Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...
, who was bound, drugged, torture
Torture
Torture is the act of inflicting severe pain as a means of punishment, revenge, forcing information or a confession, or simply as an act of cruelty. Throughout history, torture has often been used as a method of political re-education, interrogation, punishment, and coercion...
d, rape
Rape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
d, and died as a result of the drugs given him and the position in which he was tied down
Positional asphyxia
Positional asphyxia, also known as postural asphyxia, is a form of asphyxia which occurs when someone's position prevents them from breathing adequately. A small but significant number of people die suddenly and without apparent reason during restraint by police, prison officers and health care...
..
Dirkhising's death received only regional media coverage until a Washington Times article ran a story nearly a month after his death, noting the lack of national coverage in contrast to that given to the 1998 death of Matthew Shepard
Matthew Shepard
Matthew Wayne Shepard was a student at the University of Wyoming who was tortured and murdered near Laramie, Wyoming, in October 1998...
. The Shepard murder was approaching its first anniversary and as such was getting another round of national attention coupled with updates on pending hate crime legislation. Prompted by coverage in the Washington Times, the Dirkhising case gained notoriety as conservative commentators compared media coverage of the two cases and explored the issues of what was considered a hate crime
Hate crime
In crime and law, hate crimes occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, social status or...
. The added attention resulted in mainstream
Mainstream
Mainstream is, generally, the common current thought of the majority. However, the mainstream is far from cohesive; rather the concept is often considered a cultural construct....
media also reporting the Dirkhising case in relation to the coverage of the Shepard case, with many attempting to explain why the two were handled differently by the media, and perhaps received differently by readers.
The media coverage of the Dirkhising case was repeatedly and consistently contrasted with that of the high-profile Shepard case, although the cases were dissimilar in several important details. While both victims died as the result of assaults by two men, Dirkhising was a minor and the victim of a sex crime, while Shepard, an adult, was murdered as part a robbery gone south. While homosexuality has been cited as an issue in both cases, the circumstances were different and in contrast: Shepard was an openly gay
Closeted
Closeted and in the closet are metaphors used to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning and intersex people who have not disclosed their sexual orientation or gender identity and aspects thereof, including sexual identity and sexual behavior.-Background:In late 20th...
man who was attacked by two heterosexual men, while Dirkhising was raped by two men who were described as "lovers" in a police affidavit.
Background
Jesse Dirkhising was the son of Tina and Miles Yates Jr. from the small town of Prairie Grove, ArkansasPrairie Grove, Arkansas
Prairie Grove is a city in Washington County, Arkansas, United States. The population was 2,540 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Fayetteville–Springdale–Rogers, AR-MO Metropolitan Statistical Area. Located here is the Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park...
. At the time of his death, he was aged 13 and was in the seventh grade. David Carpenter, who was charged with his murder, was then 38, and lived about 30 miles away in a "small but booming northwest Arkansas town" called Rogers. Joshua Macave Brown, 22, shared Carpenter's apartment. Carpenter managed a beauty salon and was a friend of Dirkhising's parents. Dirkhising had stayed with the two men at their apartment on weekends for two months prior to his death. Brown, who had been sexually molesting Dirkhising for two months prior his death, claimed that Dirkhising was a willing participant. The child's family had been told he was helping out at the salon.
Death and investigation
On September 26, 1999, Dirkhising's murder was brought to the attention of police at Rogers, ArkansasRogers, Arkansas
Rogers is a suburban city in Benton County, Arkansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city has a population of 55,964. The city is located in the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers Metropolitan Area, in the northwest corner of the state.-History:...
when they responded to a 911
9-1-1
9-1-1 is the emergency telephone number for the North American Numbering Plan .It is one of eight N11 codes.The use of this number is for emergency circumstances only, and to use it for any other purpose can be a crime.-History:In the earliest days of telephone technology, prior to the...
call. They went to the home of David Carpenter, where Joshua Brown was also present. Police found that Dirkhising had been tied to a mattress and that his ankles, knees, and wrists had been bound with duct tape
Duct tape
Duct tape, or duck tape, is cloth- or scrim-backed pressure sensitive tape often sealed with polyethylene. It is very similar to gaffer tape but differs in that gaffer tape was designed to be cleanly removed, while duct tape was not. It has a standard width of and is generally silver or black...
and belts. Dirkhising had been gagged with his own underwear, a bandana
Bandana
Bandana can refer to:*Another name for a kerchief*Bandana *Bandana *Bandana, Kentucky, a small town in the United States*Y Bandana, a Welsh alternative rock band.**Y Bandana , their self-titled debut album....
and duct tape. According to police, he had also been drugged. Police determined that Dirkhising had been repeatedly raped over a period of several hours. It was later revealed that over a two-day period Dirkhising had been repeatedly raped and sodomized with various objects. After the men took a break to eat, Brown noticed Dirkhising was not breathing and alerted Carpenter, who attempted to resuscitate
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is an emergency procedure which is performed in an effort to manually preserve intact brain function until further measures are taken to restore spontaneous blood circulation and breathing in a person in cardiac arrest. It is indicated in those who are unresponsive...
the boy, then called 911. Dirkhising later died in hospital, his death hastened apparently as the result of positional asphyxia
Asphyxia
Asphyxia or asphyxiation is a condition of severely deficient supply of oxygen to the body that arises from being unable to breathe normally. An example of asphyxia is choking. Asphyxia causes generalized hypoxia, which primarily affects the tissues and organs...
.
Police found in Carpenter's home material of a pedophile
Pedophilia
As a medical diagnosis, pedophilia is defined as a psychiatric disorder in adults or late adolescents typically characterized by a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children...
nature, including instructions on how to sedate a child, and a diagram of how to tie up and position the boy, as well as other notes of fantasies of molesting children. It was speculated that one of the men planned the assault and the other carried it out. The Arkansas
Arkansas
Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...
State Police recorded in their affidavit a statement by Brown that he had been molesting Dirkhising for at least two months prior to Dirkhising's death. Brown called the molestation 'horseplay' and claimed that Dirkhising was a willing participant. According to age of consent
Age of consent
While the phrase age of consent typically does not appear in legal statutes, when used in relation to sexual activity, the age of consent is the minimum age at which a person is considered to be legally competent to consent to sexual acts. The European Union calls it the legal age for sexual...
laws in Arkansas, Dirkhising was incapable of giving informed consent
Informed consent
Informed consent is a phrase often used in law to indicate that the consent a person gives meets certain minimum standards. As a literal matter, in the absence of fraud, it is redundant. An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the...
for sexual activity.
Brown also later claimed he himself was "under the influence of methamphetamine
Methamphetamine
Methamphetamine is a psychostimulant of the phenethylamine and amphetamine class of psychoactive drugs...
" when talking with his arresting officers.
Media coverage
Dirkhising died two weeks before the first anniversary of Matthew Shepard's murder. Dirkhising's case initially was reported regionally by "news organizations in Arkansas and also covered by newspapers in Oklahoma and Tennessee," yet almost no national press. The Associated PressAssociated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
ran the story on its local wires but not nationally until a month later when the story was focused on the lack of coverage rather than the crime itself. A LexisNexis
LexisNexis
LexisNexis Group is a company providing computer-assisted legal research services. In 2006 it had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records related information...
search revealed only a few dozen articles that appeared only after the Washington Times story on the lack of coverage on October 22, 1999, a month after Dirkhising's death.
Accusations of liberal media bias
On October 22, 1999, approximately one month after his death, the Washington Times ran a story with the headline "Media tune out torture death of Arkansas boy." The story contrasted the lack of coverage of the Dirkhising case with the treatment the murder of Matthew Shepard received. The story quoted Tim Graham, director of media studies at Media Research CenterMedia Research Center
The Media Research Center is a content analysis organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, founded in 1987 by conservative activist L. Brent Bozell III...
, a media watchdog group that frequently criticizes "liberal bias," as saying, "Nobody wants to say anything negative about homosexuals. Nobody wants to be seen on the wrong side of that issue." Brent Bozell, media critic and director of the Media Research Center
Media Research Center
The Media Research Center is a content analysis organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, founded in 1987 by conservative activist L. Brent Bozell III...
, accused the media of deliberately spiking the story. Bozell wrote, "Had he been openly gay and his attackers heterosexual, the crime would have led all the networks. But no liberal media outlet has as its villains two gay men."
After the Washington Times article, the lack of coverage of Dirkhising's case was noted by conservative commentators and was attributed to the homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
of the perpetrators as well as the nature of the crimes. Conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan
Pat Buchanan
Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan is an American paleoconservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior adviser to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought...
noted that showing gay men as sadistic barbarians does not fit the "villain-victim script of our cultural elite."
The Dirkhising case was repeatedly compared with the media coverage of the murder of Matthew Shepard
Matthew Shepard
Matthew Wayne Shepard was a student at the University of Wyoming who was tortured and murdered near Laramie, Wyoming, in October 1998...
although Dirkhising was a minor in a sex crime and Shepard's murder was a hate crime involving adults. Also the sexualities of the victims and attackers differed somewhat with Shepard being an openly
Closeted
Closeted and in the closet are metaphors used to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning and intersex people who have not disclosed their sexual orientation or gender identity and aspects thereof, including sexual identity and sexual behavior.-Background:In late 20th...
gay man attacked by two heterosexual men, while Dirkhising's attackers were lovers and presumed to be gay.
Jonathan Gregg wrote in Time, "Matthew Shepard died not because of an all-too-common sex crime, but because of prejudice. Essentially, Shepard was lynched
Lynching
Lynching is an extrajudicial execution carried out by a mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake or shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people. It is related to other means of social control that...
; 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
Child abuse
Child abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...
is unfortunately no big news, lynching still is."
In the month after Shepard's murder, LexisNexis
LexisNexis
LexisNexis Group is a company providing computer-assisted legal research services. In 2006 it had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records related information...
recorded 3,007 stories about his death compared with only 46 in the month after the Dirkhising murder. However, once the media seized on the story, this count rapidly rose into the thousands. Many of the articles justified the lack of coverage, citing that the death did not justify national attention; initial reports failed to mention that the two perpetrators were gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....
, whereas the Shepard reports identified Shepard as gay and the crimes as hate crimes from the beginning. In a November 4, 1999, Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine article, Jonathan Gregg opined that accusations of liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
media bias were not justified because the two cases varied with the Dirkhising murder offering "no lessons," whereas the Shepard murder "touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons."
Accusations of homophobia
Gay self-proclaimed conservative commentator Andrew SullivanAndrew Sullivan
Andrew Michael Sullivan is an English author, editor, political commentator and blogger. He describes himself as a political conservative. He has focused on American political life....
wrote an article in The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
accusing the liberal media of political correctness
Political correctness
Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...
and using Dirkhising's death to attack the Human Rights Campaign
Human Rights Campaign
The Human Rights Campaign is the United States' largest LGBT advocacy group and lobbying organization; according to the HRC, it has more than one million members and supporters...
for its support of hate-crime legislation. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) also complained that the Washington Times "omitted a key piece of information" for its front-page story on Dirkhising. The HRC had provided a statement strongly condemning the crime and called for the perpetrators to be punished "to the fullest extent of the law." Sullivan also criticized some aspects of the conservative coverage of the Dirkhising case equating gay sex with child molestation as "ugly nonsense". Sullivan squarely summed up the differences in media coverage as being due to political interests. Sullivan stated that whereas the Shepherd case was used to support including LGBT
LGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...
people in federal hate-crime law the Dirkhising case was ignored for concerns of inciting anti-gay prejudice
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...
. In November 1999, E.R. Shipp
E.R. Shipp
E.R. Shipp is an American journalist and columnist. As a columnist for the New York Daily News, she was awarded the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for "her penetrating columns on race, welfare and other social issues."...
, ombudsman
Ombudsman
An ombudsman is a person who acts as a trusted intermediary between an organization and some internal or external constituency while representing not only but mostly the broad scope of constituent interests...
at The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
, noted that "readers, prodded by commentators who are hostile to LGBT
LGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...
people and to what they view as a 'liberal' press" had raised questions about the Dirkhising case. Shipp said, however, that she "made a clear distinction" between the Dirkhising and Shepard cases: "Matthew Shepard’s death sparked public expressions of outrage that themselves became news. . . . That Jesse Dirkhising’s death has not done so is hardly the fault of the Washington Post." Shipp also noted that the Shepherd story was newsworthy because of the debate it fostered on hate crimes and the level of intolerance towards LGBT people in the United States.
The story of the September 26 death was transmitted by Associated Press national news wires on October 29, and the Post ran a news brief the following day.
Jonathan Gregg, in a November 9 Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine editorial, asserted that "[the killing of Dirkhising] was the kind of depraved act that happens with even more regularity against young females and, indeed if the victim had been a 13-year-old girl, the story would probably never have gotten beyond Benton County, much less Arkansas. The same editorial also said: "A red herring worth addressing at the outset is the failure to distinguish between homosexuality and pedophilia, which creates a false parallel at the core of the Washington Times argument. But sex with children is a crime regardless of the sexes involved, and is not synonymous with homosexuality. . . . "The reason the Dirkhising story received so little play is [that] it offered no lessons. Shepard's murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons. "Jesse Dirkhising's death gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men."
Trials and convictions
Davis Don Carpenter and Joshua Brown were each charged with capital murder and six counts of rape, and they faced the death penalty in Arkansas for the crimes. Neither man had any known prior convictions. The two men were tried separately, as it was believed "each of them will blame the other for the murder." The Arkansas state prosecutor "maintained that the older man had mapped out the assault and watched a portion of it" so chose to send Brown (the younger lover) to trial first. Carpenter's court-appointed attorney, criminal defense lawyer Tim Buckley, sought a change of venueChange of venue
A change of venue is the legal term for moving a trial to a new location. In high-profile matters, a change of venue may occur to move a jury trial away from a location where a fair and impartial jury may not be possible due to widespread publicity about a crime and/or its defendant to another...
from Benton County citing excessive pretrial publicity. "It's been on everyone's lips down here for a month and a half," Buckley stated. The Washington Post was "almost alone among national newspapers" reporting on Brown's trial and Fox News
Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel , often called Fox News, is a cable and satellite television news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation...
was the only network to cover the murder trial and conviction. The prosecutors "argued that Jesse suffocated to death during the sexual assault because of a combination of the drugs and the way he was trussed up." In March 2001, Brown was found guilty of first-degree murder and rape. He was sentenced to life in prison, and this sentence was upheld on appeal
Appeal
An appeal is a petition for review of a case that has been decided by a court of law. The petition is made to a higher court for the purpose of overturning the lower court's decision....
by the Arkansas Supreme Court in September 2003. In April 2001, Carpenter pleaded guilty to similar charges and was also sentenced to life. Subsequently, Carpenter said on the Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel , often called Fox News, is a cable and satellite television news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation...
that Brown was solely responsible for the rape and murder of Dirkhising while Brown said that Carpenter was the director.