Stanley Lingar is scheduled to die at 12:01 A.M. Wednesday for the 1985 shooting and beating death of a 16-year-old boy. Bill Dobbs, the spokesman for the gay justice group QueerWatch, says Ripley County prosecutors improperly admitted evidence that Lingar is gay during the penalty phase of his trial to enflame the jury and convince to order death. Attorney General Jay Nixon says Lingar’s homosexuality helped explain why he killed the male victim for refusing to perform a male act. And he insists the reason Lingar got the death penalty was because of the brutality of the crime.
