"Gay panic" defense banned in NY murder cases

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Since as early as the 1960s, defense lawyers have introduced the idea that people accused of murdering lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people had acted in a state of temporary insanity caused and justified by their victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The legal strategy, known as the “gay panic” or “transgender panic” defenses, was not always effective, and as attitudes toward L.G.B.T. people shifted, it was used less often. But it has still been deployed in recent years by lawyers hoping to win a jury’s sympathy, lessen a defendant’s charges or shorten a sentence.

On Wednesday, New York became the seventh State Legislature to approve a ban on such defenses.
 

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That feels like a defense that could be extracted out to "justify" any murder, which should really tell anyone that it's a bad defense to start with.

"I'm sorry your honor, I was overcome.by Idiot Panic.'. I just had no control.
 

Innula Zenovka

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For what it's worth, very broadly speaking, in the UK, the broadly equivalent defence would be "loss of control," which replaced the old common law defence of provocation. It's available only as a partial defence to a murder change (i.e. it reduces it to manslaughter) and if the defence raise it, then they have to prove various points so that they satisfy the jury that, on the balance of probabilities, various tests are met.

One of the points they must satisfy the jury is that, on the balance of probabilities,
a person of D's sex and age, with a normal degree of tolerance and self-restraint and in the circumstances of D, might have reacted in the same or in a similar way to D.
(D is the defendant here, obviously), and the qualification about "a normal degree of tolerance and self-restraint" serves to block attempts to use the defence in cases like this (or, which was sometimes argued as part of the defence of provocation, when a husband kills his wife on discovering she's unfaithful).

The whole area of diminished responsibility (which is completely different, and applies only to abnormalities of mind caused by recognised medical conditions) and loss of control is horribly difficult and, in practice, neither defence is successfully used very often.

I've also oversimplified loss of control quite a bit here, but the point is that the requirement that the defendant must persuade the jury that a person with "a normal degree of tolerance and self-restraint" might have reacted in the same way means you can't use "loss of control" in this sort of case. That's what the provision is there for.

Certainly I prefer the use of a general restriction like that to ruling out specific lines of argument.
 
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