Matthew Shepard. Billy Jack Gaither. Scott Amedure, the guest who revealed his gay crush on the “Jenny Jones” show.
When the nation’s first-ever symposium on “Defeating the Gay Panic Defense” convened in Atlanta last week, many of the cases featured in the opening video presentation were familiar to those who followed the highest profile anti-gay killings of recent years.
But one name which never made national headlines loomed largest during the three-day forum for criminal justice and law enforcement officials: Ahmed Dabarran.
An assistant district attorney in Fulton County, Dabarran was killed May 6, 2001, in his Cobb County apartment.
“For many prosecutors, the gay panic defense may be an academic thing, but for us it is very personal,” Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard said during the symposium’s opening session on Feb. 24.
Like the men who murdered Shepard and the other higher-profile victims, Dabarran’s accused killer attempted to excuse his actions by claiming they were necessary to fend off unwanted sexual advances — a strategy dubbed the “gay panic defense.”
Unheard of in heterosexual contexts or among women who kill women, experts say the defense thrives on a culture that raises men to believe that homosexuality is a threat against masculinity, and that masculinity must be maintained at any expense.
In Dabarran’s case, it worked.
On Feb. 28, 2003, a Cobb County Superior Court jury acquitted Roderiqus Reshad Reed of murder and all other charges in Dabarran’s death. Reed’s attorneys focused on allegations that Dabarran — who was born in Somalia and had a wife from an arranged marriage, although they did not live together — led a secret gay life.
According to the defense, Dabarran lured Reed to his apartment with promises of a party “with girls,” and then performed oral sex on Reed while another man pointed a gun at him.
Reed took Dabarran’s cell phone, car and identification and admitted in court testimony to hitting Dabarran several times in the head. But his attorneys contended the actions were justified in order to escape. Cobb prosecutors argued that Dabarran was asleep at the time.
Critics claimed the Cobb assistant district attorney who handled the case failed to counter the defense strategy of demonizing Dabarran. At the time, prosecutor Tom Cole and District Attorney Pat Head refused comment on their handling of the case.
Meanwhile, the outcome continues to haunt Dabarran’s coworkers in the Fulton District Attorney’s office.
“One of our own was brutally murdered, and his murderer walked away with absolutely no justice,” Holly Hughes, a Fulton prosecutor who heads up the county’s hate crimes unit, said at the symposium.
A desire to see some good come from Dabarran’s death prompted the Fulton office to put on the ground-breaking forum.
“I never got the impression the Cobb County prosecutors threw the case, or that they were not well-meaning and didn’t intend to get a conviction,” Howard said. “But as I have talked with other people about the case, what I’ve found is there is really a lack of knowledge about gay panic. …
“So I said to my staff, we ought to not just complain about this, but we should do something to help others learn about it.”
The Feb. 23-25 symposium offered continuing education credits for attorneys and law enforcement officials. It featured a wide range of discussions, from panels on broader social issues to more practical advice on how to ward off the strategy through initial police interrogations, jury selection and prosecutors’ opening and closing statements to jurors.
Co-hosted by the Atlanta Police Department and the FBI’s Atlanta office, the event drew 145 registered attendees, according to Erik Friedly, spokesperson for the Fulton district attorney.
Most attendees were from jurisdictions in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Representatives from the FBI, Georgia Bureau of Investigations and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia also participated, Friedly said.
One local district attorney’s office was notably absent.
“Where the hell is Cobb County?” asked Bernadette Hernandez, a gay investigator with the Fulton district attorney’s office, during a Feb. 25 town hall meeting wrapping up the event.
No one from the Cobb district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the Dabarran case, registered to attend the symposium, Friedly confirmed.
But the Cobb County Police Department did send an officer.
“The Ahmed Dabarran case was in Cobb County, and our deputy chief wanted somebody here to represent the police department,” Cobb Det. Richard Plunkett said.
Cobb prosecutors could not be reached for comment by press time.
Presenters at the gay panic symposium included prosecutors, police officers and activists.
Jeffrey Montgomery, executive director of Michigan’s Triangle Foundation and a board member for the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects, has consulted on numerous gay panic cases and decried the “insidious nature” of the defense.
“The only way to succeed with a gay panic defense is to dehumanize and defame the victim,” Montgomery said.
Defense attorneys aren’t the only ones to blame when it works, Howard noted.
“The community has to face the face that if [anti-gay] bias didn’t exist, the lawyers wouldn’t try to use it,” he said.
But while the tactic may influence jurors, the gay panic defense is not a formal legal defense as defined by criminal law texts, according to other presenters at the symposium.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Stephanie Manis compared the gay panic tactic to other recent “syndrome” defenses, including the “urban survival defense” (where a black defendant attempted to justify shooting his own cousins by blaming the stress of living in a violent ghetto) and the “abused child defense” (where adults Eric and Lyle Menendez blamed shooting their parents on childhood abuse).
“Remember that a defense cannot be used to justify, condone or mitigate an act of violence unless it satisfies clear rules of legal analysis,” Manis warned.
Prosecutors should focus on the legal definitions of self-defense, including the requirement that the defendant’s actions have to be “reasonable” and in proportion to the threat against him, noted Sheila Ross, head of the Fulton District Attorney’s Cold Case Squad.
Using deadly force to defend against a non-violent sexual advance doesn’t meet that legal test, and prosecutors should stress that in their arguments to jurors, Ross said.
Despite the outcome of the Dabarran case, the gay panic defense is not usually successful in winning an outright acquittal, but it often leads to convictions on lesser charges, according to information presented at the symposium.
In the so-called “Jenny Jones” case, Jonathan Schmitz was a guest on an episode devoted to secret crushes. During the show, it was revealed that the person who had a crush on Schmitz was a gay acquaintance, Scott Amedure.
On March 9, 1995, three days after taping the episode that never aired, Schmitz shot Amedure to death at close range. In 1996, a jury convicted Schmitz — but only of second-degree murder.
An appeals court overturned that conviction on a technicality, but another jury reached the same verdict in a second trial in 1999, resulting in a prison sentence of 25 years to 50 years.
The gay panic defense also played a role in the high profile Shepard case.
Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson posed as gay to lure the gay Wyoming college student from a bar in Laramie, then severely beat the slight young man and left him tied to a remote fence post to die.
Facing a charge of first-degree murder and possible death penalty, Henderson pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of felony murder, receiving life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A jury later convicted McKinney of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, aggravated robbery and kidnapping, but acquitted him of the most serious charge, first-degree premeditated murder. He too was sentenced to life without parole.
During his trial, McKinney’s lawyers attempted to argue that the attack was prompted by a sexual advance from Shepard that triggered McKinney’s memories of sexual abuse from a male neighbor as a child.
The trial judge barred the gay-panic defense from the trial, but not before it had already been mentioned in front of jurors.
Dave O’Malley, the police officer who led the investigation in the Shepard case, traveled from Laramie to Atlanta to attend last week’s symposium. Hearing the gay-panic theory definitely affected the jury’s verdict, he said.
Speaking on a panel about how police attitudes affect gay panic cases, O’Malley offered a compelling look at how working on the Shepard case changed his own perspective
Before the case, anti-gay slurs like faggot “rolled off my tongue as easily as ‘I love you’ to my kids,” O’Malley admitted.
Now vice mayor of Laramie, O’Malley speaks out on gay issues and lobbied Congress to include sexual orientation in federal hate crimes laws. His story of his own transformation drew a standing ovation from symposium attendees.
“As tragic as Matt’s death was, if he has a legacy, it’s things like this that come out of it,” O’Malley said in an interview.
On Feb. 24, O’Malley fought back tears as he received the first Ahmed Dabarran Award, created by the Fulton District Attorney’s Office to honor someone dedicated “to educating communities on the importance of human rights and fighting for equal justice for all people.”
Prosecutors and law enforcement officials who attended last week’s symposium said they planned to use what they learned when they returned home.
“I’m here as a training instructor to take this back and educate some of the officers,” said Lt. Lillianna Stevens of the Forest Park, Ga., police department. “We don’t want to be perceived as people who are prejudiced against anyone.”
Paige Edwards, a patrol supervisor with the Fulton County Police Department, said the symposium showed her that countering the gay panic defense “starts at the very first level.”
”I think from a patrol perspective, it gives us a better idea, as they talked about, about having additional compassion and don’t re-victimize your victims,” Edwards said.
Some attendees cited both personal and professional reasons for attending the forum.
“Since I’m gay and I work with a gay youth group back in Savannah, I thought there would be a lot I could take back to the teenagers I work with, and also to my colleagues in the DA’s office,” said Allison Bailey, an assistant district attorney in Savannah, Ga.
Howard said he wants to see the symposium expand even further by being adopted as an official training course by the National District Attorneys Association.
NDAA Executive Director Thomas Charron spoke at the symposium and pledged his support.
“We have to face [the gay panic defense] with logic,” Charron said. “There is no case law on the face of the earth that will back this approach, so we have to fight it in the trial courts, the court of appeals, and most importantly, in the court of common sense — the community.”
Laura Douglas-Brown can be reached at lbrown@sovo.com.
