(Washington, D.C.)  Attorney General John Ashcroft has given federal prosecutors the go-ahead to seek the death penalty against the man charged with the 1996 slayings of two lesbian hikers in Shenandoah National Park.

Federal authorities are involved in the case because the slayings occurred in on federal property. The attorney general's permission is required for federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty. 

It is the first time that a prosecution will go forward under Virginia's 1994 law allowing harsher penalties for crimes motivated by bias against gays and lesbians and the first time federal prosecutors will use a state hate crime law to prosecute someone accused of a gay bias crime anywhere in the US.

Julianne Marie Williams  24, of St. Cloud, Minn., and Laura "Lollie" Winans  26, of Unity, Maine, were found about a week after they set out on a camping trip in May 1996. Their throats were slit, their mouths gagged and their hands bound.

Darrell D. Rice, 35 has been charged with the killings.  At the time of his arrest he was serving an 11-year sentence for assaulting a female bicyclist in the park in 1997.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tony Giorno said the brutality of the killings led him to seek permission from the Attorney General to pursue the death penalty against Rice. 

Rice is charged with two counts of capital murder in the killings and faces two additional counts of capital murder on grounds he intentionally selected his victims because they were female and gay.

When the original indictment of Rice was announced in April, the Justice Department said the grand jury had said the two victims were singled out because of their gender and sexual orientation.

Prosecutors have quoted Rice as saying he selected women to intimidate and assault because "they are more vulnerable than men" and that Winans and Williams "deserved to die because they were lesbian whores."

Although bias crimes against gay people is not illegal under federal law Ashcroft has compared cases of hate killings with those of terror attacks on the United States.

"Hatred is the enemy of justice, regardless of its source," Ashcroft said last year. "We will not rest until justice is done for Julianne Marie Williams and for Lollie Winans."

One of Rice's attorneys, Frederick Heblich of Charlottesville, said Ashcroft's action was not unexpected. "We've been preparing our defense on the assumption that it would be a death penalty case," he said.