BAY MINETTE (AP) – A second defendant pleaded guilty Wednesday to the 2004 murder of a gay Bay Minette teenager who was beaten, stabbed and strangled.

Robert Holly Lofton Porter, 21, entered the plea before Baldwin County Circuit Court Judge Lang Floyd and was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences on murder and robbery charges.

Porter’s plea came a week before he was slated for trial in the killing of 18-year-old Scotty Joe Weaver.

“We just calculated the totality of everything and decided that would be appropriate,” Baldwin County District Attorney Judy Newcomb told the Press-Register in a Wednesday story.

Porter had been charged with capital murder. Under the plea, he will be spared the death penalty and eventually can be paroled.

The Mobile paper reported on its Web site that Porter didn’t speak much during the brief sentencing, but as he was escorted down a courthouse hallway after the hearing, he said of the Weaver family: “Just tell ’em I apologize.”

Christopher Ryan Gaines, 23, also avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to capital murder in May. Gaines, who will not be eligible for parole, was described by prosecutors as disliking Weaver because of his homosexuality and choking the victim with a rope.

Liz Campbell, who is representing Porter, said he “gave confessions that he participated in the murder, so it’s kind of hard for him to deny that.”

She said her client would be eligible for parole in 15 years even though his sentences are back to back.

Prosecutors said a plea agreement is possible with a third defendant, Nichole Bryars Kelsay, 21, who is awaiting trial.

Weaver was beaten, strangled, cut, burned and robbed of about $80 in July 2004. Prosecutors have alleged that Gaines and Kelsay called upon Porter to help them kill Weaver.

Newcomb called Porter “someone who is less culpable in that he didn’t come up with the plan.”

Gaines and Kelsay, who had been dating at the time, shared an apartment with Weaver in the Pine Grove community.

Authorities have said that the three attacked Weaver when he returned from working the overnight shift at the Bay Minette Waffle House. His burned and decomposed body was found off of a rural dirt road, a few miles from his home southeast of Bay Minette.

SILVERHILL (AP) – In an effort to raise AIDS awareness, about 45 activists gathered at the Wales West Light Railway and RV Resort where an HIV-positive boy was barred from the pool and showers until the park’s owner could confirm his presence was not a health hazard.

The activists, most of them infected with the HIV virus, traveled to the park Monday where they had a Labor Day picnic.

The 20-acre park made national news when a Saraland couple, Dick and Silvia Glover, accused the park of discriminating against their foster son, Caleb, 2.

The Glovers decided to vacation there in early July. When they tried to take their foster son for a swim, Ken Zadnichek told his employees to bar him from the pool and showers until he could confirm that there was no health hazard in letting the boy swim with other guests. The Glovers left the park for accommodations at another RV resort and called reporters.

“Everyone wants to call me the mean old guy that kicked the HIV baby out of the swimming pool, which is nuts,” Zadnichek said. “We were concerned as much about what he would catch from the other kids as what they would get from him.”

The activists, most of whom are affiliated with the Campaign to End AIDS, said in a news release that they originally intended to surprise Zadnichek, reserving several of the park’s 76 sites under the guise of a family reunion.

But Larry Bryant, an HIV-positive resident of Washington, D.C., said to hold an angry protest wouldn’t have accomplished the activists’ aim of raising awareness about the disease and erasing the stigma faced by people living with AIDS and HIV.

Bryant said Zadnichek and his wife, Ann, had been helpful in arranging the activists’ stay.

“We’re glad to see them,” Zadnichek said. “We don’t want to turn anyone away.”

Dick Glover, who suffers from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, wasn’t able to make it Monday. But Sylvia Glover brought Caleb, now 3, who finally went for that swim.

The Associated Press – The nation’s first openly gay governor has offered his support for beleaguered Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, saying the public should not judge Craig harshly despite the outrage stemming from his arrest and guilty plea in a gay sex sting.

In a letter published Monday in The Washington Post, former Gov. James E. McGreevey urges Craig’s critics to “fill their hearts with compassion and equanimity.”

Craig has called assertions that he has engaged in gay sex ridiculous and, after a news conference last week, stated that “I am not gay. I never have been gay.” Craig said he had kept the incident from aides, friends and family and pleaded guilty “in hopes of making it go away.”

In his letter, McGreevey questioned whether Craig was facing a double standard due to the nature of the charge and discussed at length a similar incident that McGreevey was involved in nearly 25 years ago.

“I can only pray that Larry Craig and his loving family come to peace with his truth, whatever that may be,” McGreevey wrote. He also noted that Craig “did not have a lover on the payroll, as I did; nor did he engage in sexual relations for money or use his office for unethical or professional or personal gain.”

A message left Monday night for Dan Whiting, Craig’s communications director, was not immediately returned.

Craig’s downfall started last Monday with the stunning disclosure that he had pleaded guilty to a reduced charge following his arrest June 11 in a Minneapolis airport men’s room. The 62-year-old Republican initially vowed to stay on, but eventually bowed to pressure from his GOP colleagues and announced Saturday that he would resign effective Sept. 30.

McGreevey stunned the nation when he announced in August 2004 that he was “a gay American” and said he was resigning as governor because of an alleged blackmail threat by a former lover, an aide whom McGreevey had put on the state payroll. The man, Golan Cipel, has denied being gay and said McGreevey sexually harassed him.

The majority of McGreevey’s 930-word letter discusses the personal conflicts and emotional pain he experienced because he was gay and Roman Catholic, saying that as a teen he decided his only options were suicide or keeping his sexual orientation private.

McGreevey – who switched his religious affiliation to Episcopalian earlier this year and will begin full-time studies Tuesday at an Episcopal seminary in New York – also recounts in the letter an incident that he says occurred while he was in his late 20s.

Following a political dinner, he pulled into a Garden State Parkway rest stop, parked his car and flashed his headlights, which he states was “the signal.”

Instead, he was approached by a state police trooper who questioned him at length about why he was in the area.

A flustered McGreevey proclaimed his innocence, and a short time later the trooper told him he was free to go. The trooper also told him “I never want to see you here again.”

McGreevey then drove off, thinking “I’ve survived another day.”

WASHINGTON (AP) – An experimental HIV drug from Merck & Co. Inc. should be quickly approved for use by patients running out of treatment options, U.S. government advisers recommended Wednesday.

The panel of outside experts agreed unanimously that available data support accelerated approval of Isentress, also known as raltegravir, by the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA isn’t required to follow the advice of its outside advisory panels but does so most of the time. Merck expects an agency decision by mid-October. If approved, Isentress would be the first in a new class of anti-retroviral drugs called integrase inhibitors.

The Merck drug targets integrase, one of three enzymes used by the virus to replicate and infect cells. The FDA previously has approved drugs that target the two other enzymes, protease and reverse transcriptase.

Isentress is meant to be used as part of a “cocktail” of drugs to fight HIV in patients who have developed a resistance to older medications. HIV – the human immunodeficiency virus – causes AIDS.