Alabama Man Wins Lesser Murder Conviction from Using the Gay Panic Defense

Posted on | March 1, 2006

Last evening Pam Spaulding posted a story about how some animal in Alabama getting a conviction of felony murder in the shooting death of Birmingham Southern College professor Sammie Speigner III on February 17th, 2005. It read the first couple of lines and I was ready to spit nails. Speigner, a 37 year-old gay man, was shot and bled to death in an apparent robbery committed by then 19 year-old Raymond Carlisle. Carlisle shot Speigner twice, stole his car and wallet, and took off on a joy ride leaving Speigner mortally wounded and bleeding to death. Later, he used one of Speigner’s credit cards to buy cigarettes and beer with friends and even went so far as to rent out the professor’s car for a few days after the murder.

Naturally being Alabama and as homophobic as that state is, the defense used the blame-the-victim strategy known as "the gay panic defense" in order to argue for the lesser charge as opposed to the prosecution’s view that the case was capital murder. The defense went way over the line on this one and not only sought to blame Speigner for being murder but attempted to vilify him as well. I try to avoid name calling but I cannot help it this time. One of Carlisle’s defense attorneys, Cynthia Umstead, decided to be a fucking cunt and try to turn the murder into something Speigner asked for. The defense painted Speigner as someone who would cruise the streets looking for younger men to pick up for sex and when he tried to pick up Raymond it backfired. She even comes out and clearly states that the victim was at fault for his murder by comparing Speigner who supposedly "lured" Carlisle with the promise of Marijuana, to a child molester who would use a puppy to lure a child into their clutches. She also goes on to say:

"This was [Speigner's] MO, and Mr. Carlisle reacted badly to it," Umstead said. "But there was some culpability on the part of the victim and what he was trying to do at the time."

Funny thing is she just justified every rapist who says that his female victims were dressed provocatively and so forth. It truly does because it is the exact same kind of victim blaming. What pisses me off even more is that the defense said the whole experience traumatized Carlisle so much. They even went so far as to play the HIV card because Speigner was apparently HIV positive at the time of his murder. That sick, twisted little game aside, usually when I am traumatized by something I either withdraw or I freak out. I do not kill someone, steal their car and wallet, buy beer on their credit card and rent the car I stole out for a couple of days.

What the lesser verdict means is that the jury felt that the murder was incidental to the robbery and not something Carlisle had set out to do. Since they bought the "gay panic" defense, their conclusion would be logical. However the judge in the case really dropped the ball when it came to sentencing. With the range of 20 to 99 years to sentence Carlisle to prison, Judge Clyde Jones sentenced Carlisle to twenty-one years in prison; one year more than the maximum. Carlisle will be eligible for parole in the years. Way to be tough on crime Judge Jones! And as Pam put it, there is no justice in Alabama.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know I absolutely loathe when defendants and their lawyers blame the victim. Anyone with half a brain and an ounce of common sense knows that the gay panic defense seeks to shift the blame for the crime from the perpetrator onto the victim solely on the basis of the victims sexuality. What Raymond Carlisle’s attorney means when she says that he panicked in the face of a supposed sexual advances from a gay man is that if Speigner had not been homosexual, he would still be alive today. That is what angers me. But I guess I could flip it around and say that people who panic when gays hit on them are gay themselves in the midst of a reaction formation.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Alabama Man Wins Lesser Murder Conviction from Using the Gay Panic Defense”

Kathy
March 2nd, 2006 @ 8:53 am

Thanks for the link. This case infuriates me and breaks my heart. I don’t understand how a judge in “tough on crime” Alabama could hand out such a light sentence (I realize 21 years is a long time, but he could have been sentenced to 99).
Handi
March 7th, 2006 @ 6:40 pm

The sorry scum attorneys and the morally limp Judge in this case, are both culpable.

I recall a Judge in redneck Florida a couple of years back, blaming a female rape victim because she had on a mini skirt.

This kind of decision in a court of law is more dangerous for the precedent it sets. Some scum attorney will now dig up this putrid decision and use it against some battered, beaten or dead gay person in the future.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Handi in Dallas