Gay Bashing Convicted Murderers Marry in Britain’s First Prison Gay Wedding
In a historic first, two convicted murderers have partaken in Britain's first same-sex prison wedding; however, both men are in prison for committing anti-gay murders.
Mikhail Ivan Gallatinov, 40, and Marc Goodwin, 31, married on Friday at the high-security Full Sutton Prison in East Yorkshire, according to the Mirror, becoming Britain's first same-sex married prison couple.
The ceremony took place in the children's play area and was attended by family members, some prisoner friends of the couple, and four invited prison guards as well as the six on-duty security guards. The couple exchanged vows and rings, which they bought from a mail order catalogue with the prison's permission.
The couple said they were "soul partners" and would be "forever together."
According to the Guardian, Gallatinov was sentenced in 1997 for the murder of a man he met on a gay phone hotline. The presiding judge said Gallatinov, who is also a convicted pedophile, committed a "cold-blooded, well-planned, callous, chilling and apparently motiveless killing."
His new husband, Goodwin, was arrested and sentenced in 2007 for the murder of Malcolm Benfold in what police called a "a savage, senseless homophobic attack that resulted in the death of a harmless man."
The couple, the Mirror reports, had been wanting to get married for some time and kept filing for a civil union but was constantly denied. However, when same-sex marriage became the law in England last year, the couple finally was allowed to marry under the Marriages Act of 1983, which grants prisoners the right to marry.
When Peter Benfold heard about the relationship his brother's murderer had with another prisoner, he told the Daily Record and Sunday Mail: "Hopefully they will strangle each other."
"I can't understand how another gay person could have done that to my brother. He took a life. He should be in prison for life," he continued.
The couple met a couple of years ago in the prison, a source told the Guardian.
"These two guys were on separate wings at Full Sutton and used to meet -- and have sex -- in the prison library. Then they managed to get on the same wing and had sex regularly," she explained.
The U.K. Ministry of Justice pointed out to the Guardian that no taxpayer money was spent on the wedding.
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