Republicans joined Democrats to pass a law banning the “gay panic” murder defense in New Hampshire

When New Hampshire state Rep. Shaun Filiault (I) campaigned on a promise to pass a law that banned the LGBTQ+ panic defense for murder, he couldn’t have imagined the political wrangling involved and where the twists and turns would lead him.

Filiault ran as a Democrat but left the party to become an Independent, he said, because Democrats didn’t put enough effort into passing the bill. Instead, he found support for it in the Republican party.

Related:

Texas man gets probation after using ‘gay panic’ defense to explain killing his neighbor

The jury ruled that if a gay man makes a pass at a straight man, it is deserving of death.

Gov. Chris Sununu (R) signed the bill into law last week.

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“That really shows this is a bipartisan issue of protecting lives and protecting public safety,” he told The Keene Sentinel. “It is nice to see this signed by a Republican governor in a state that has a Republican-controlled legislature.”

Most Democrats supported the bill; the full House passed it in a voice vote on March 22. But Filiault had to scramble to ensure Senate Republicans would pass it. He cut a deal to support a proposed state constitutional amendment to make it law that New Hampshire must hold the first-in-the-nation presidential primary. He said Democratic leadership did not back the deal, spurring him to leave the party.

The state senate passed the bill on a voice vote in June.

The law forbids homicide defendants from claiming temporary insanity because an LGBTQ+ person made a sexual advance toward them.

In 2013, the American Bar Association released a unanimous resolution asking all governments, from federal to state to tribal to local, to ban the defense. Still, as of now, only fifteen states have done so.

“There are unfortunately too many places throughout America… where a judge could hear that sort of transphobic or homophobic argument and think, ‘Yeah, I would have a similar reaction,’” trans Virginia Delegate Danica Roem (D) said after her state banned the defense in April. “That is extremely real.”

According to the Movement Advancement Project, the LGBTQ+ panic defense generally isn’t used independently, but it is often used alongside other defense strategies to advocate for leniency.

The defense has been used in several prominent cases. It gained national attention in a 1995 case where a gay man, Scott Amedure, told his straight friend Jonathan Schmitz that he was attracted to him on the Jenny Jones Show.

Three days later, Schmitz shot Amedure and turned himself in to police, and he argued in court that he was “embarrassed” on national TV. He avoided a first-degree murder conviction and was convicted of second-degree murder.

The use of the  “gay panic” became even more publicly discussed with the murder of Matthew Shepard, where his killers claimed that Shepard had “come onto” one of the duo. Similarly, the “transgender panic” defense gained prominence in the way of the 2004 murder of Gwen Araujo in Newark, California.