Really? Too bad the facts don't synch up with that argument. At least in the US.
In 1987, Joseph Mitchell Parsons, who called himself the "Rainbow Warrior,"[15] claimed that he killed Richard Lynn Ernest to defend against a homosexual advance, but was unable to present any evidence at trial to support this claim.[16] The victim's family and friends stated in court that Ernest was not gay or bisexual.[17] Prosecution witnesses testified of Parsons' homosexual activity in jail.[18] A forensic psychiatrist from the University of Utah stated that the descriptions of Parsons' sexual history indicated that he "may have been the one initiating the contact and became angry when [Ernest] turned him down."[19] Parsons was executed by lethal injection at Utah State Prison in October 1999.[15]
In 1995, one of the highest-profile cases to make use of the gay panic defense was the trial of Jonathan Schmitz, who killed his friend Scott Amedure after learning, during a taping of The Jenny Jones Show, that Amedure was sexually attracted to him. Schmitz confessed to committing the crime but claimed that Amedure's homosexual overtures angered and humiliated him. Legally, this defense had a very weak standing for him, since in cases of legal provocation providing for diminished capacity, it is required to have an immediate response. Since he had not acted until three days after the incident, legally, he failed to show any panic-based violent psychosis. He was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison.
In the 1998 murder of university student Matthew Shepard, the defendants claimed in court that the young man's homosexual proposition enraged them to the point of murder. However, Judge Barton Voigt barred this strategy, saying that it was "in effect, either a temporary insanity defense or a diminished capacity defense, such as irresistible impulse, which are not allowed in Wyoming, because they do not fit within the statutory insanity defense construct." After their conviction, Shepard's attackers recanted their story in a 20/20 interview with Elizabeth Vargas, saying that the murder was a robbery attempt gone awry under the influence of drugs. This claim was denied by the defendants' girlfriends.
A transgender variant of the gay panic defense was also used in 2004–2005 by the three defendants in the Gwen Araujo homicide case, who claimed that they were enraged by the discovery that Araujo, a transgender teenager with whom they had engaged in sex, was biologically male. The first trial resulted in a jury deadlock; in the second, defendants Mike Magidson and Jose Merél were convicted of second-degree murder, while the jury again deadlocked in the case of Jason Cazares. Cazares later entered a plea of no contest to charges of voluntary manslaughter.
This was also tried in the cause of Angie Zapata, that guy is now doing life without parole.
It's not exactly a winning strategy.
