SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - A judge has signed the execution warrant for Utah man on death row. Michael Archuleta was convicted for the brutal torture and murder of a homosexual man in 1989.
Archuleta was convicted and sentenced to death in 1989.
On Wednesday, Fourth Circuit Judge Donald Eyre ruled that Archuleta's appeals to the U.S. and Utah supreme courts had been denied and that no state action prevented Archuleta's execution.
The judge set Archuleta's execution for April 5, 2012.
Archuleta had the option of choosing the manner of his execution. and picked a firing squad.
Court documents show that Archuleta and an accomplice kidnapped 28-year-old Gordon Ray Church, a Southern Utah University theater student who had confessed to being gay in 1988.
Court documents show that Archuleta and his accomplice put Church in a car trunk and drove to a remote Millard County area, where they attached jumper cables to Church's testicles and shocked him with a car battery before raping him with a tire iron, beating him and burying him in a shallow grave.
Archuleta's accomplice was given life sentence for his role in the murder.
