what power jesus have on people

[Leroy]

Dan Leach II -- who police said was so moved by the The Passion of the Christ movie that he confessed to killing his girlfriend -- may be the first person prosecuted under a state law defining a fetus as a person, experts said Friday.

The law, which took effect Sept. 1, could be the difference between life and death for the 21-year-old Rosenberg man, who is charged with murder.

Investigators are trying to determine if the victim, Ashley Nicole Wilson, 19, was pregnant when she died in January. If so, Leach could face a capital murder charge in the slaying of two people during the same act. Capital murder is punishable by death, while murder carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Fort Bend County District Attorney John Healey refused Friday to speculate whether a capital murder charge would be filed.

"The investigation will continue to gather any evidence that will further clarify whether or not Miss Wilson was pregnant at the time of her death," Healey said.

In a jailhouse interview Friday, Leach told the Rosenberg Herald-Coaster that there were other factors besides the movie that led him to confess.

He said a discussion with a minister friend was one.

"And so, after watching that movie, I was very emotional, and so I thought about the things I had done," he said.

Ralph Gonzalez, lawyer for Leach, said he is eager to obtain a copy of the autopsy report.

Beverly Begay, chief examiner with the Harris County medical examiner's office in Houston, declined to comment Friday on whether an autopsy showed Wilson to be pregnant. Begay referred all questions to law enforcement authorities.

Fort Bend County Justice of the Peace Fay Dettling said she has not received a final autopsy report.

"I ordered a full autopsy, and that is what I expect to get," she said Friday.

Sheriff's investigators said Thursday that officials with the medical examiner's office told detectives Wilson was not pregnant.

Wilson's parents, Renee Wilson Coulter and Dan Wilson, have said the doctor who performed the autopsy told them their daughter was not pregnant. But they say they have medical records from their daughter's physician showing she was six to eight weeks pregnant.

A letter written by the slain woman found at her Richmond apartment first led authorities to believe she hanged herself.

In the letter, Wilson said she was despondent because she was pregnant and the father did not want to help raise the child.

But earlier this month, Leach told Fort Bend County Sheriff's Department detectives that he strangled the woman and made the death appear to be a suicide because she told him she was pregnant with his child.

Leach told police he learned how to disguise the killing from the television crime show CSI. But he said he wanted to seek "redemption," authorities said, after seeing Mel Gibson's controversial movie, which depicts Christ's final hours of suffering in gruesome detail.

In the Herald-Coaster interview, Leach said a series of "pricks in his heart" from God compelled him to confess.

"I knew I was wrong in doing it when I did it," he is quoted as saying. "I knew I was wrong in not going forward with it immediately. I knew throughout several occasions, when it came to mind, that I needed to do something about it."

Joe Pojman, executive director for the Austin-based Texas Alliance for Life, said if Fort Bend County authorities prosecute Leach in the death of the fetus, Leach would be the first person he knows of who would be prosecuted under the new Texas law.

He said a pregnant woman was slain in Round Rock in October but there are no arrests in that case.

The organization, which opposes abortion and assisted suicide, helped draft the law and has lobbied for its passage since 1999, Pojman said.

An individual is defined by Texas statutes as a being who is alive -- including an unborn child at every stage of gestation, from conception to birth.

Pojman said more than half of the states have laws protecting fetuses from violence, but Texas has one of the strongest because it defines all stages of gestation as a human life.

The Texas law also allows civil lawsuits if negligence causes the harm or death of a fetus.

The law specifically exempts abortion providers from prosecution and does not allow the mother to be prosecuted, Pojman said.

State Rep. Jessica Farrar, D-Houston, the only person who voted against the bill, said she is concerned that the broad definition of a fetus as life could be used to narrow abortion rights. She proposed an alternative bill that would have enhanced criminal punishment against anyone who injured or killed a fetus, without defining it as a living person.

Pojman said such enhancements would not have led to the possible imposition of capital murder charges if a pregnant woman is killed.

He said California has had a similar law since the 1970s and abortion rights have not been curtailed.

[SINLOC]

weird shit eh damn it touched him alright