The Gay Panic Defense

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Carsten Andreessen: There are four main ways lawyers use the gay panic defense. He says it's more of a tactic used to bolster other traditional criminal law defenses. The first is part of an insanity defense, he says. And that pass or overture was so threatening to me that I lost my sanity temporarily, and I killed that person.

In 1995, two men filmed an episode of the daytime talk show, The Jenny Jones Show. A few days later, one of the men was dead. The shooter later claimed he’d committed the murder “in a panic that he was being falsely accused or identified as a gay person.”

We speak with Cynthia Lee, Carsten Andresen, and Paul Howard about so-called “gay panic” and “trans panic” defenses, and we discuss the murders of Scott Amedure, Islan Nettles, Larry King, Ahmed Dabarran, and Matthew Shepard.

Thanks to Thomas Curry, who helped co-produce this episode.

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