Gay Panic: The New Twinkie Plea

Heard about this on The O'Reilly Factor...that's right, Lefties, one of your favorite punching bags and your most hated network seems to be about the *only* ones even reporting on this. I couldn't find it on CNN.com.

Basically, a guy stabbed a transvestite 20 tiimes, killing her, and gets off with a three year sentence because he was under the influence of "gay panic". In other words, he was so stunned to find out that his date was a man that he lost his grip on reality and acted out murderiously.

This is a disgusting miscarriage of justice and part of a disturbing trend of coming up with ludacris reasons to excuse people from their actions. If this is allowed to stand, it's sets a dangerous precedent and sends the message loud and clear that it's ok to murder homosexuals/trasgenders/and transvestites.

Jake, I'd love to hear your views on this case. Neehai-I think we've found something we can agree on.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,170954,00.html


Man Gets Four Years in Prison for Transgender Slaying

FRESNO, Calif. — Four years isn't much time to spend behind bars for stabbing a man 20 times, but that's what one man got for a killing in Fresno, Calif., last year, after a blind date in a bar went terribly wrong.

Estanislao Martinez (search) didn't deny that he repeatedly stabbed Joel Robles with a pair of scissors, but his lawyer told the judge he had a good excuse — he killed the victim in what he called a "gay panic."

Martinez and Robles had been out drinking and went back to Martinez' apartment for some privacy. But at the time, Martinez thought Robles was a woman. He soon found out Robles was a cross-dressing man.

"The decedent represented himself to be female. She/he said he was female to him," said Martinez' lawyer, Roberto Dulce. "There was some sexual activity that occurred. All under the impression that Mr. Martinez was engaging in sexual activity with a woman."

Martinez went into a rage after he realized Robles was a man, stabbed him repeatedly, then jumped out his window onto the street. People found him naked and covered in blood a short time later.

In court, Dulce, a public defender, argued that the attack was a case of "gay panic," not cold-blooded murder.

"It's a rage that ... doesn't justify the conduct, but excuses it to a certain degree and therefore it's not murder," Dulce said.

Dulce said the panic Martinez felt was a sort of temporary insanity brought on by the shock of realizing he had been duped by a transgender (search) man. Dulce said his defense is similar to "heat of passion" arguments made in the past.

"When ... you come home [and] you find your wife in bed with another man and you wind up killing either one of them, it's voluntary manslaughter," Dulce said.

Martinez pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and could have faced as many as 11 years in prison. The crime and the punishment have outraged the gay community.

"It wasn't manslaughter. So, what is their excuse? A plea-bargain so they don't have to deal with it? I think they've made it abundantly clear that transgender people are not valued and it's OK to kill them," said Charlotte Jenks, a gay and lesbian activist in Fresno.

Because Martinez pleaded guilty, the case is not eligible for appeal by either side. And with good behavior, Martinez could be a free man in less than three years.

Gay Panic? That is bad as the PMS excuse. This crap should not be tolerated. Can you use "the devil made me do it"? Ohh yeah you can, insanity

I don't find this shocking at all. People use gay panic all the time.

Our current President got a lot of his votes this way.

Whether you panic that we will fuck you, or get married to animals or molest your children or work in your business. It is all the same.

I am surprised a conservative would choose this example of gay panic to get worked up about.

So glad I'm dutch. That kinda stuff makes me sick to my stomach.

Also am I the only one who strongly suspects that the victim is misrepresented here? If she claimed she was female, then she was likely a transsexual, not a "he" or a "crossdressing male".

In an alternate universe, Estanislao Martinez called himself "Tom Smith" and then revealed he was Mexican once the two were in bed, causing Joel Robels to freak out in a case of "mexican panic" and kill him.

Was the victim dishonest? Perhaps.

Should they die for that dishonesty? No.

I think you misunderstood me. I just strongly suspect that the victim wasn't a transvestite but a transsexual and the press is just stupidly getting their facts wrong, but I may be reading too much into it.

Just reminds me of how I saw a documentary on Brandon Teena (formerly Teena Brandon) and sitting through a half hour of hearing people use "she". I'm probably just wrong in my assumption though, but the press and media can fuck up really nicely when it comes to that.

They've got it wrong before, this gives me a vibe of them getting it wrong, and people calling transsexuals transvestite and the wrong gender is a pet peeve of mine, heh, it's especially distasteful if the person in question is dead due to some hate-crime related to it.

Rambling now, so I'll leave it at that, heh.

The 'gay panic' defense has been used before: the 1999 trial of Aaron McKinney for the death of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming (Shepard was beaten so severely that shards of his skull had severed his brain stem).

I am anxiously awaiting the "nagging panic" in which a "nagged" husband, pushed to the edge by his wife's incessant complaints, flies into a rage and beats her to death. The "nagging panic," of course, would be brought on by years of verbal abuse following childhood experiences of "demoralization," "belittlement," and "naner-naner."

How ethical is it to play heavily and without compunction on the fears of a homophobic public (jury) in a court of justice? These defenses simply perpetuate misunderstanding and fear. Meh.


P.S. Touche, Cory

I think all these sorts of defenses are founded on a semantic confusion between the idea of explanation and that of justification. Someone being dead drunk/gay-ly panicked/on LSD or whatever is a really good part of the explanation of why they did what they did, in fact it's invaluable and interesting information in that regard. The mistake is in associating that explanation with a justification.

The discovery of the reason behind their actions doesn't in any way justify them. It doesn't abrogate their responsibility or make it any less wrong. It's just a foolish confusion between two meanings of the word "reason."

O' Reilly is no "leftie". He is a concervative.

I'm having a WTF panic attack.

Go back and re-read. Kiamat said O'Reilly is the "favorite punching bag" of the lefties and that he broadcasts on their "most hated network." He didn't say O'Reilly himself was a lefty. People don't use themselves as phunching bags. Well, not usually, anyway.

Me too. Let's kill eachother!

Somebody apparently needs to figure out which who is who here.

two lessons to be learned....

- don't drink
- don't fuck anyone you don't know

These rules work for all genders

I've missed you champie. Let's make out.

"don't drink and fuck"

You always say that Champie.

So when are we going to get to know each over with a couple of drinks?

I'm going out on a limb here and am going to go against the consensus expressed so far in this thread.

There are still quite a few people that do not recognize the validity/correctness of transgendered people. In specific, in many people's minds a female transgenered person is equated in their mind as 'a male surgically altered to appear female'. Or vice-versa, for the female->male folks reading this.

Sexuality/gender is an extremely personal thing to many people, transgendered or not. So when a person is told the person they had sex with is in actuality of the same sex, then at the very least it should be expected to come as an extreme shock and likely to cause some emotional trauma. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually someone tries to claim it as a form of rape.

That's not to say this in any was justifies the killing of anyone. There's no justification for that except for self-defense purposes. 'Gay panic' is no justification. However, it seems to me that it's not as black-and-white as a man killing a transgendered person. Instead, I'm of the opinion there's two victims here.


- Newfie

I'm still trying to figure out where the gay picnic with twinkies is, this thread is totally misleading

Poor Taco. I had the same problem--the whole Twinkies thing got me all excited. What a let-down.

http://www.ezoons.com/images/2005/09/twinkies.jpg



(Dianne--your reply to my post is elegant)

But only one of the two victims is dead.

By the way, research done in Amsterdam has concluded that the neural pathways of a transsexual person match the patterns of their chosen gender when examined by cutting the hypothalamus into thin slices. They studied dead transsexual bodies to reach this conclusion, as well as non transsexual hypothalamusses. There's a distinct pattern change in visible "dots" in the hypothalamus for each gender. One is much more clumped, the other much more spread out.

The hypothalamus spread in dead transsexuals matched those of their chosen gender. They even dissected a transsexual who had never had any hormone treatment or surgery, to examine wether hormonal changes could effect it. Again the chosen gender matched.

Of course, too many people don't know about this, and too many people will disregard hard scientific advice that transsexuality is a real affliction, something you are born with. I find it amusing though that people only accept birth defects when they manifest in physical disease or other plainly visual deformity's (elephantism, siamese twins, this story I read about a boy being born with their unborn twin's fetus stuck in his abdominal cavity, etc) and not when the effects are less plainly visually clear.

Considering the wide myriad and vastly baffling things that can go wrong with the human body in general, let alone as birth defects, I'm amazed people can question the possibility of people being born with a miswired brain. Heh. Especially with things like asperger's syndrome and autism around.

Does anyone have good stats on what judges in California do for more typical cases where someone pleads guilty to un-premeditated killing? It's hard to decide if this is an unusually light sentence without that.

To me it seems to fall into the general category of crimes where people are let off too easy on the basis of whether they are "responsible" or "sane". IMO if someone is insane or irresponsible, all the more reason to keep them locked up safely.

--- wrong thread ---