TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Florida Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book (D-Davie) and Rep. Rita Harris (D-Orlando) filed new laws Wednesday to ban Florida defendants from claiming “gay panic” as an excuse for criminal acts.
Senate Bill 328, additionally known as the “Gay and Transgender Panic Legal Defenses Prohibition Act” would stop people from blaming their criminal offenses on panic attributable to “nonviolent sexual advance or specified perceptions or beliefs about another individual.”
The bill text states that “The Legislature finds that gay and transgender panic legal defenses raised in criminal proceedings characterize sexual orientation and gender expression or gender identity as objectively reasonable excuses for a perpetrator’s loss of self-control, and that these defenses thereby illegitimately attempt to mitigate the responsibility of the perpetrator for harm done to lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender individuals.”
The Gay Panic Defense
The homosexual panic defense, according to the George Washington University Law School, is a courtroom defense technique the place, sometimes, a heterosexual man has been charged with murdering a homosexual man and claims “the gay man made an unwanted sexual advance upon him,” inflicting the defendant to panic and kill the sufferer.
According to Prof. Cynthia Lee, this technique of authorized defense is “troubling because they seek to capitalize on unconscious bias in favor of heterosexuality, which is prevalent in today’s heterocentric society.”
While not an formally acknowledged authorized defense, Lee wrote that some authorized methods depend on it for help of a wide range of pleas, equivalent to “claims of insanity, diminished capacity, provocation, and self-defense.”
The time period in a way, form, or kind has existed since being coined in 1920 by Dr. Edward J. Kempf, a psychiatrist as “homosexual panic.”
The Conversation, a nonprofit, unbiased news group, published an article on the Gay Panic Defense, citing a research of circumstances in the U.S. from 1970 to 2020. The research confirmed that in Florida, in accordance to The Conversation’s evaluation, the defense had been used 5 occasions.
Florida History
A launch from Sen. Book stated that is her third 12 months making an attempt to move the laws, in addition to calling on the state legislature to apologize for its Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, often known as the Johns Committee, named for state senator Charley Johns, (D-Gainesville). While in the state Senate, Johns served as Senate President in 1953, then quickly assumed workplace as Acting Governor upon the dying of Dan McCarty. He served in the Senate till 1966.
The Johns Committee operated between the 1956 to the 1965, utilizing taxpayer funds to examine Florida faculties and universities for professors and college students who have been members of the LGBTQ neighborhood, investigating the NAACP, and suspected communist organizations.
By its own writings, the FLIC stated it was charged by state statute to examine “all organizations whose principles or activities include a course of conduct on the part of any person or group which would constitute violence, or a violation of the laws of the state, or would be inimical to the well being and orderly pursuit of their personal and business activities by the majority of the citizens of this state, as well as the extent of infiltration into agencies supported by state funds by practicing homosexuals, and the effect thereof on said agencies and the public, and the policies of various state agencies in dealing therewith.”
The committee’s investigations resulted in the reported dismissal or resignation of greater than 100 educators and leaders at three Florida establishments: The University of Florida, Florida State University, and the University of South Florida. For instance, one professor, Dr. Sigismond deRudesheim Diettrich, tried to kill himself because of this, which is documented in his resignation letter to UF employees.
The committee misplaced funding for its operations in 1964 after releasing a report titled “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida,” a report which detailed the investigations by the Johns Committee. The legislative group’s work has been compared to the McCarthy Era of the United States, identified for the Red Scare the place Americans have been investigated for potential ties to the Communist Party throughout the Cold War Era.
USF’s Oracle publication wrote in 2003 that Sen. Johns had “made it his mission to rid the state of Communists, homosexuals, and the NAACP.” Saying Florida was a state with “a tradition of political persecution, religious invective, and racial segregation,” opposition to the Johns Committee’s actions was “sparse and sporadic.”
In 2019, Book introduced a resolution to have Florida apologize for the Johns Committee’s work. It has but to acquire sufficient help in the legislature to move.