DC Council moves to ban ‘gay panic’ defense in criminal cases

WASHINGTON - The D.C. Council today began work on a supporters say will protect the victims of hate crimes against gay and transgendered people. It seeks to limit the uses of so-called “gay panic” as a defense in criminal cases.

The bill which was introduced today would limit the ability of people charged with violent crimes from claiming they acted in self-defense when learning the victim was gay.

D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson is the sponsor of the bill and he says the goal of the “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Panic Defense Prohibition Act of 2019” is to make it unacceptable for people to claim panic as a defense, as if the victim was at fault for the bias-related crime.

 
The bill would counter the three ways the panic defense has typically been used to mitigate a violent crime charge. Typically, those methods or by claiming either insanity, diminished capacity, provocation, self-defense.

The Chairman told FOX 5 “The multiple acts of violence in the District and adjacent to the District against transgendered individuals is a piece of this” and added “We know for years there’s been individuals who’ve been accused of assaulting, even murdering, other people who have gay or transgendered and then claimed that they panicked.”

Under Chairman Mendelson’s bill, a defendant wouldn’t be able to claim they acted in a “heat of passion” if their action was based on the discovery of a person’s actual or perceived gender identity, even if the person “made an unwanted, non-forcible romantic or sexual advance toward the defendant.”