Opinion ID: 1454677
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: introduction to this tragedy

Text: Students of current law, in considering precedent to be the cornerstone, recognize and discuss in detail today that precedent from an individual case cannot be extracted from the particular facts from which the decision was made. Comparably, this case should not be perpetrated upon future litigation without recognition of all encompassing tragedy, detail and horror from which this appellant's conviction and life sentence resulted. Students of Greek tragedies and devotees of horror movies could find no more unbelievable the misuse of humanity than what comes to front stage here to showcase the death of Sonny Price and Chief, the penitentiary confinement of appellant's brother Timmy, and now the life sentence of appellant for murder. Timmy, in years gone by, had been repeatedly raped by his uncle, Sonny Price, without criminal prosecution and the same perversion was committed upon appellant. Within these facts and other family conflicts, this case did not just happen one cold winter night in a trailer house near Jackson, Wyoming. It took a lifetime of horrible acts to get here. The issues created in the admitted homicide prosecution followed from action by appellant against his uncle from an attitude which had been advertised in a number of public statements and became well known by the ultimate victim. The distasteful and disgusting history of the sexual abuse committed by appellant's uncle and the consuming hatred held for him by appellant colors and pervades this record. No one with knowledge of this family doubted that the hatred existed and, overtly, the uncle knew and feared when and how the price might be collected by appellant's stated intent to kill him. This record tells an unbelievably nasty, brutal and perverted tale of cardinal sins and the ultimately effected capital punishment for those offenses committed upon two small boys by homosexual rape and bestiality. Dead now is the uncle's participating boyfriend, which occurred in earlier time, the uncle who was killed and Chief who walked into the gun in Nevada with the apparent intent to die. Surviving only in terms hardly less tragic is appellant with his life sentence and his younger brother who, at trial date, was serving an extended term in the Wyoming State Penitentiary for rape. I fear that the evil which consumed the relationship of these parties in early life, followed by homicide and ultimate trial, will now emanate from Wyoming case law to spread its pervasive pollution in future cases. This record would sustain criminal case determination that Chief and appellant went to the rural trailer house where Sonny Price resided with criminal intent  appellant to kill and Chief to obtain money or property by robbery. The record lacks in substance, however, that appellant intended to or did individually commit either larceny or robbery and, furthermore, leaves in doubt who wielded the knife by which the victim was stabbed a number of times.