California: Jurors consider fate of Samuel Woodward, who fatally stabbed a gay man in alleged hate crime

LOS ANGELES — When Samuel Woodward decided to kill a gay high school classmate in January 2018, according to a prosecutor, he chose a weapon with symbolic significance: a knife with his father's name etched on it.

During his murder trial in Orange County Superior Court, both sides portrayed the 26-year-old Woodward as a young man who struggled with his sexuality growing up in a conservative Newport Beach family, with a particularly disapproving father.

"Who better to prove to that you're not gay than this homophobic father?" Deputy Dist. Atty. Jennifer Walker told jurors. "'I'm not gay, look what I just did.'"

Walker's remarks came during closing arguments, last week and early this week, in Woodward's three-month trial. Jurors began deliberating Woodward's fate Tuesday afternoon.

Woodward is charged with first-degree murder, with a hate-crime enhancement, for stabbing Blaze Bernstein 28 times in a Lake Forest park.

Woodward's attorney, Assistant Public Defender Ken Morrison, acknowledged that his client was guilty of the killing, which he called a "hideous crime," but said it was voluntary manslaughter, not murder.

"There's no premeditation or deliberation," he told jurors, arguing that Bernstein had provoked Woodward. He said the killing had no connection to his client's interest in the Atomwaffen Division, an extremist group whose anti-gay, anti-Jewish propaganda was found on Woodward's computer.

Bernstein was both Jewish and gay, but the hate-crime enhancement only applies to his sexual orientation.

On the night of the killing, Bernstein and Woodward exchanged flirtatious text messages. They had known each other casually years earlier at the Orange County School of the Arts, where Woodward had a reputation based on his far-right, anti-gay views.

Woodward, who kept a "hate diary" in which he bragged of pranking and frightening gay men, had dropped out of college and was living with his parents. Bernstein, an openly gay University of Pennsylvania student, was staying with his parents over winter break in Lake Forest.

...continued

swipe to next page