Dr. Tiller was one of the nation’s few physicians who performed late-term abortions.
Roeder was also convicted on two counts of aggravated assault for threatening to shoot Keith Martin and Gary Hoepner, ushers in the Reformation Lutheran Church who tried to stop him as he fled after murdering Dr. Tiller.
Whether Roeder shot Tiller at point-blank range in the forehead at Tiller's church in Wichita last May was never at issue; Roeder had admitted it to reporters, in court filings and finally to a jury on Thursday. He also said he had been stalking Tiller since at least 1999.
The defense’s only witness, Roeder said he felt relief after shooting Tiller in May 2009, stopping for pizza after the murder. He had wanted to claim the crime was justifiable homicide, based on his belief that abortion—in every case—is murder. Sedgwick County Judge Warren Wilbert said he could not claim that he acted out of necessity.
Abortion rights groups became alarmed when Roeder's attorneys asked the judge to allow the jury to consider convicting Roeder of voluntary manslaughter. However, at the end of the testimony yesterday, Justice Wilbert ruled that the jury could only consider premeditated, first-degree murder.
The conviction brings a kind of closure to the city of Wichita, which became a center of the anti-abortion movement in the late 1980s and 1990s.
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