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." 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 to trial first. Carpenter's court-appointed attorney, criminal defense lawyer Tim Buckley, sought a change of venue 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