What Is The Laramie Project Unethical

In Moises Kaufman’s play The Laramie Project , a group of people travel to Laramie, Wyoming to conduct interviews about Matthew Shepard horrible death. The problem is that these people all go into Laramie assuming this murder was a hate crime, therefore they are very biased in the way the assume Aaron McKinney and Russel Henderson killed Shepard because he was gay. By doing this they stayed away from the problems that Shepard had, such as prostitution and Methamphetamine. Later, Jimenez goes and conducts interviews as-well, but he doesn’t shy away from the truth. Shepard was not murdered because he was a homosexual, and McKinney and Henderson were not motivated by “hate” because he was gay. A hate crime is defined as a “ crime committed because

Although the Murder of Shepard was a horrible act, it was not a hate crime because he was motivated by drugs and greed.

There are many reasons as to why this brutal murder was not motivated through homophobia. The most obvious reason is that McKinney is allegedly bi-sexual. In Jimenez’s 20/20, Jimenez focuses on the outside factors that contributed to this

Shepard dabbled in selling and using Methamphetamine, as-well as other drugs. Shepard and McKinney both ran with the same crowed, the people involved in Meth. The fact that they were both involved in Meth played a huge role in contributing to Shepard's death. Vargas says that on the night of the attack, Mckinney went out “ to rob a drug dealer of $10,000 worth of methamphetamine. ” (20/20) This is when Henderson and McKinney first got the idea to rob him.Romaine Patterson also talking about Shepard’s money and says that “money meant nothing to Matthew, because he came from alot of it. ”,(pg 28). This shows that it was well known that Shepard had money, thus making him a prime target to get robbed, which is what McKinney and Henderson planned to do. While this is being planned, McKinney is coming off a week of being on Meth. This causes him to think and act irrationally. What started out as a “routine” robbery quickly escalated into something more drastic and violent. Henderson says Mckinney“struck him across the face with the gun when he tried to stop the continued beating of Shepard ”. (20/20) The robbery escalated into murder because McKinney was high on Meth. If Shepard had never gotten involved in drugs, he would still be alive today. Meth was another primary factor involved in the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, which played a role in his death, not the fact that Shepard was