On January 21, New Jersey became the ninth state in the nation to ban the gay panic defense, a strategy that the governor said is “rooted in homophobia.” W.
Carsten Andresen, a criminal justice scholar, has been building a database of murder cases that use the gay panic defense. We asked him to tell us more about these cases, and what sets them apart from other murder trials.What is the gay panic defense?This is when a man kills someone and claims that he was protecting himself from a same-sex