Michael Anthony Rodriguez is set to become the first member of the Texas Seven to die tonight, The Dallas Morning News reports. The Texas Seven is the band of convicts that escaped from a prison in South Texas in 2000, then killed a police officer in Irving before being captured in Colorado after six weeks on the run. Defense attorneys for Rodriguez, who’s originally from Dallas, have said he was sexually abused by a teacher at a Catholic high school he attended in San Antonio. The attorneys also argued that a lifelong effort to conceal his homosexuality from a religious family may have led to his criminal behavior. But in a recent interview with the Associated Press, Rodriguez said that was a lie.
“I felt so horrible, the depth of evil I fell into,” Rodriguez said. “That whole thing, then going gay, that was a lie. It’s not true. We just had to come up with something.”
And that’s the best they could do? Shit, if you could get away with killing people just because you’re gay, don’t you think this whole struggle for equality thing would have been a little easier?
