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Second Brazil rancher sentenced in U.S. nun murder


    BRASILIA (Reuters) - A court in Brazil sentenced on Saturday a second rancher to 30 years in prison for ordering the murder in 2005 of U.S.-born nun Dorothy Stang, who defended poor peasants and opposed the destruction of the Amazon rain forest.

    A jury in the Amazon port city of Belem found Regivaldo Galvao guilty of ordering the murder of 73-year-old Stang, according to a statement on the web page of the Para state judiciary.

    Defence lawyers will decide within 5 days whether to appeal, the statement said.

    Galvao was the last of five defendants to be tried in the Stang case. Last month Galvao's accomplice, Vitalmiro Moura, also a rancher, was convicted in a retrial to the maximum sentence of 30 years in prison for hiring gunmen to commit the murder.

    Stang was shot six times in February 2005 as she held her Bible and was left lying in the mud in the town of Anapu in Para, a frontier state where loggers and ranchers have deforested huge swaths of the world's biggest rain forest.

    Stang, an Ohio native, had for more than 20 years helped peasants threatened by loggers and ranchers in Brazil's northern Para state, one of the most devastated by deforestation.

    The much-delayed process of convicting her killers has been widely seen as a test of Brazil's ability to tackle widespread impunity in the region.

    President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had called Moura's 2008 acquittal a "stain" on Brazil's image abroad. A retrial was ordered after it was determined that jurors had ignored evidence pointing to Moura's guilt in reaching their verdict.

    Stang's murder became a symbol of the often-violent conflicts over natural resources in the vast Amazon region.

    In the 10 years through 2008, 365 people were murdered in such disputes, according to the Pastoral Land Commission, a watchdog linked to the Roman Catholic church that monitors conflicts over land in Brazil.

    Gunman Raifran das Neves Sales and his aide Clodoaldo Carlos Batista have been sentenced to 27 and 17 years, respectively, while a third man, Amair Feijoli da Cunha, has been convicted for serving as an intermediary between the gunman and the ranchers.

    A documentary film about Stang's killing, narrated by actor Martin Sheen, has helped keep the case in the public eye.

    (Reporting by Raymond Colitt, Editing by Sandra Maler)