US: Was this a gay panic defense?

That a Texas man avoided murder and manslaughter penalties in his conviction for killing a neighbor has spurred a debate: Did he get away with the controversial “gay panic” legal defense? 

James Miller, a former Austin, Texas, police employee, was found guilty last month of criminally negligent homicide in the 2015 death of Daniel Spencer. According to testimony, Spencer had invited Miller to his home in East Austin to drink and play music. Miller said in an affidavit that Spencer moved in for a kiss and grew angry when Miller rejected him. Then Miller stabbed Spencer twice. Miller later turned himself in to police, claiming self-defense.

Miller was sentenced to 10 years probation, six months in the county jail and 100 hours of community service. He must also pay $11,000 in restitution to Spencer’s family and use an alcohol monitoring device for at least a year. Several news media, including the Washington PostHuffington Post and Atlanta Journal-Constitution called the trial tactic a gay panic defense.

But Miller’s attorney, Charlie Baird, claims his client didn’t use a gay panic defense and that Miller acted purely in self-defense. According to an NBC news story, Baird acknowledged there was no physical evidence to prove the victim had attacked his client.

“Miller testified that he believed that Spencer was making a sexual pass at him. Miller backed off and said: ‘I’m not gay.’ That was the end of the gay part of it,” Baird told the ABA Journal. “Miller was twice as old as Spencer and at least eight inches, maybe a foot shorter than Spencer. I think that’s why he felt like he had to resort to deadly force, because you can have deadly force in Texas without being armed. You don’t have to have somebody attacking you with a deadly weapon before you can use deadly force to defend yourself.”

He added: “Because neither Miller nor Spencer is/was gay, the gay panic defense could not have been employed.”

Prosecutor Matthew Foye was quoted by Austin television station KXAN saying the fact that the jury didn’t let Miller off on his self-defense claim “establishes that Daniel Spencer was a victim of a senseless killing by the defendant and he did not do anything to bring this upon himself.”

But the sentence has spurred anger among gay rights advocates and raised questions about what is a gay panic defense. Though the claim had been made in cases before, the gay panic defense gained notoriety in the 1998 Matthew Shepard murder trial. One defendant’s lawyer attempted to claim that panic inspired by Shepard making a pass at the defendant caused temporary insanity and led to Shepard’s murder. The judge rejected that claim, and the two men charged in the murder received life sentences.

In 2013, ABA House of Delegates passed a resolution urging “federal, tribal, state, local and territorial governments to take legislative action to curtail the availability and effectiveness of the ‘gay panic’ and ‘trans panic’ defenses, which seek to partially or completely excuse crimes such as murder and assault on the grounds that the victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity is to blame for the defendant’s violent reaction.” Two states—California and Illinois—have passed such legislation. Read more via ABA Journal