The 300 Weld County residents who report for jury duty Tuesday won’t know at first whether they might wind up deciding the fate of a man accused of beating to death Angie Zapata, a 17-year-old transgender woman — first with his fists and then with a fire extinguisher — last summer in Greeley.
With the trial of a man accused of brutally slaying a transgender Greeley woman about to start, gay-rights and anti-violence groups are urging Congress to pass federal hate-crime legislation. But a Denver criminal defense attorney and progressive blogger says not so fast.
“Cooler heads are needed where our fundamental liberties are at stake,” Talk Left founder Jeralyn Merritt writes Monday:
Invoking the brutal murders of Matthew Shepard and Angie Zapata, U.S. Sen. Mark Udall called on Congress “to finally pass” federal hate crimes legislation in an opinion column published Sunday in the Boulder Daily Camera.
Days before the trial of Zapata’s accused killer was set to begin in Greeley, the Boulder County Democrat lamented that “vile prejudice based on sexual orientation still plagues our society” a decade after Shepard, a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student, was beaten, tied to a fence and left to die in the cold.
A group of 50 progressive, civil rights and anti-violence groups launched a massive Internet and print media public information campaign Wednesday across Colorado to inform readers about transgender murder victim Angie Zapata, whose accused killer goes on trial in Greeley next week.
A judge ruled this week that jurors won’t hear part of the confession of a man accused of killing an 18-year-old Greeley transgender woman. The judge also ruled that prosecutors won’t be able to tell jurors that Allen Andrade has gang ties that could have been a motive in the brutal slaying last summer of Angie Zapata.
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