Samuel Woodward, who is now 27, is scheduled to be sentenced in a Southern California courtroom for the murder of Blaze Bernstein nearly seven years ago. There is no question about the sentence Woodward will receive because the jury’s verdict carries a life sentence without parole, said Kimberly Edds, a spokesperson for the Orange County District Attorney’s office.
Woodward was convicted this year of first-degree murder with an enhancement for a hate crime for killing Bernstein, a gay, Jewish college sophomore.
Bernstein, who was 19, disappeared in January 2018 after he went out at night with Woodward to a park in Lake Forest, about 45 miles (70 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles. After Bernstein missed a dentist appointment the next day, his parents found his glasses, wallet and credit cards in his bedroom and tried to reach him, but he didn’t respond.
I’ve spent enough time around religious wingnuts to know that some of them just do it out of hate and disgust. It’s not always self-disgust. Sometimes they just buy into the propaganda so deeply that any deviance is simply abhorrent and must be eradicated.
I have personally dragged a couple of people out of that mindset and they are very straight, so it was never a self-hatred thing, just a brainwashing thing.
That’s fair, and my main point was about the brainwashing too, and so I agree now that it’s irrelevant whether this guy was closeted or not.