WASHINGTON — It was 1993, and a South Dakota jury was debating whether to sentence a gay man to death. Life in prison, one juror said, would be no punishment at all. Allowing the defendant, Charles Rhines, to spend his days surrounded by men would, the juror reasoned, be a kind of reward.

“If he’s gay, we’d be sending him where he wants to go,” the juror said, according to a 2016 sworn statement from Frances Cersosimo, who also served on the jury. She did not name the juror.

Another juror, Harry Keeney, said he was convinced that Mr. Rhines deserved to die for killing Donnivan Schaeffer, who encountered Mr. Rhines in 1992 while he was robbing a doughnut store in Rapid City, S.D. “We also knew he was a homosexual and thought he shouldn’t be able to spend his life with men in prison,” Mr. Keeney said in his own 2016 sworn statement.

A third juror, Bennett Blake, described the deliberations to an investigator. “There was lots of discussion of homosexuality,” he said. “There was a lot of disgust. This is a farming community.”