New Oxford Review David J. Peterson July-August 1999
On a cold night early in 1998 a college freshman in Wyoming decided to engage in one of his periodic bouts of very hazardous behavior. He went out cruising the bars looking for rough sex with a male stranger or strangers. From a bar, the youngster went off into the night with two men who pistol-whipped him, robbed him, and left him tied to a fence by the side of a road. He died some days later in a hospital. The young man’s name was Matthew Shepard. Shepard’s parents instantly found themselves, their dead son, and their grief being exploited to publicize what the activists endlessly interviewed by the media announced was rampant anti-homosexual bias in American culture. His father told the thronging media that the death of his misguided and unfortunate son should not be so used. But the opportunity for exploitation was irresistible, and Shepard was made the poster-boy for a campaign to write into law a special protected status for homosexuals. This campaign had already been vigorous, and Shepard’s iconic murder turned it positively frenzied. The ever-opportunistic Bill Clinton appeared on television to condemn “gay bashing” and to demand new federal and state laws to combat it. He expressed perfectly the wishes of the liberal elite who intend to blanket the country with laws that will punish such “hate crimes.”
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Unfortunately, this article neglects to mention that the “gay panic” defense was attempted in the Shepard trial.
“The ‘gay panic’ defense is not based on the concept of self-defense, but on the idea that defendants have a mental problem that causes them to feel uncontrollable rage when someone makes a gay advance, and thus are not responsible for their actions.”
Of course this “advance” can be as little as extended eye contact, or the wrong type of eye contact. Also consider that the killers in the Shepard case actually went so far as to get in a car with him. I’m wondering how much of a “gay advance” was actually made in this instance. The killers didn’t exactly go running.
If we’re going to condemn adding time onto a sentence for the nature of the victim, we probably need to condemn the reduction of a sentence due to the nature of the victim as well … if we’re interested in any sort of intellectual consistency, that is.
Just as the article didn’t mention the “gay panic” defense, you failed to mention how that worked out. Lawyers will try out all sorts of stupid defense strategies. The strategy they attempt might say something about the specific lawyer. The failure of the strategy says something different about our society.