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THE UNIVERSITY DARY KANSAN
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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2006
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COURTS
New Jersey gay couples win rights
Court rules that lawmakers must allow marriage or something similar
BY GEOFF MULVIHILL ASSOCIATED PRESS
TRENTON, N.J. — New Jersey's highest court opened the door Wednesday to making the state the second in the nation to allow gay marriage, ruling that lawmakers must offer same-sex couples either marriage or something like it, such as civil unions.
In a ruling that fell short of what either side wanted or feared, the state Supreme Court declared 4-3 that gay couples are entitled to the same rights as heterosexual ones. The justices gave lawmakers 180 days to rewrite the laws.
The ruling is similar to the 1999 high-court ruling in Vermont that led the state to create civil unions, which confer all of the rights and benefits available to married couples under state law.
"Although we cannot find that a fundamental right to same-sex marriage exists in this state, the unequal dispensation of rights and benefits to committed same-sex partners can no longer be tolerated under our state Constitution," Justice Barry T. Albin wrote for the four-member majority.
The court said the Legislature "must either amend the marriage statutes to include same-sex couples or create a parallel statutory structure" that gives gays all the privileges and obligations married couples have.
The three dissenters argued that the majority did not go far enough. They demanded full marriage for gays.
Gay rights activists had seen New Jersey as a promising place because it is a largely Democratic state in the Northeast. The only state to allow
gay marriage is Massachusetts. The only states allowing civil unions are Vermont and Connecticut. New Jersey is also one of just five states that have no law or constitutional amendment expressly banning gay marriage.
If the court had legalized gay marriage outright, the effect could have been more far-reaching, and New Jersey could have become more of a magnet for gay couples than Massachusetts, which has a law barring out-of-state couples from marrying there if their marriages would not be recognized in their home states. New Jersey has no such law.
A clear-cut ruling legalizing gay marriage this close to Election Day could also have been a political bombshell to arouse Republicans. Eight states have gay marriage bans on their November ballots.
Murderer of students executed in Florida
CRIME
The bodies of his victims were found over three days in late August, just as the University of Florida's fall semester was beginning. All had been killed with a hunting knife. Some had been mutilated, sexually assaulted and put in shocking poses. One girl's severed head had been placed on a shelf, her body posed as if seated.
STARKE, Fla. — Danny Harold Rolling, Florida's most notorious serial killer since Ted Bundy, was executed by lethal injection Wednesday for butchering five college students in a ghastly string of slayings that terrorized Gainesville in 1990.
Rolling, 52, was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. EDT, more than 16 years after his killing rampage at the start of the University of Florida's fall semester.
Belongings that Rolling left at a campsite in the woods and DNA taken after a later arrest for robbery linked him to the slayings. When he came up for trial in 1994, he shocked the courtroom by pleading guilty.
The killing spree touched off a huge manhunt and plunged the laid-back college town into panic. Students fled and residents armed themselves.
Brutal killings terrorized Gainesville in 1990
"There are some things you just can't run from, this being one of those," Rolling told the judge, who later sentenced him to death.
The attention surrounding Rolling's impending execution reopened old wounds in Gainesville and for the families of the victims.
More than 100 protesters gathered near dozens of death penalty supporters, curious onlookers and journalists on the barren cow pasture across from the prison, possibly the largest turnout since Bundy's execution.
Dianna Hoyt, whose stepdaughter was killed by Rolling and decapitated, planned to watch the execution at Florida State Prison. "This is a tough thing, but is a necessary thing to go through," she said, adding, "It is very hard for us to see someone else die. But he deserves it."
The victims' families ran an advertisement Thursday in The Gainesville Sun, thanking the community for its support: "We hope you will remember August 1990 and the years that followed without any sense of community shame for what has happened here. You turned a blemish into a rose."
Bundy, suspected in the deaths and disappearances of 36 women, died in the electric chair in 1989 in the same death chamber. The case was still fresh in the minds of many when Rolling's killings began the following year in roughly the same area as some of Bundy's crimes.
Associated Press
Phil Sandlin/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Harry Kenner, left, and Jeff Davis demonstrate in favor of the execution of Danny Rolling who is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6pm Wednesday, for the 1996 murder of five University of Florida students, at the Florida State Prison at Starke, Fla.