“The 'gay and trans panic' defenses are arguments that some criminal defendants have raised when being charged with murdering an LGBTQ+ person,” Mallory told Oxygen.com. According to the American Bar Association, the "gay panic" defense helped Schmitz be convicted of the lesser charge of second-degree murder instead of first-degree murder. The defense failed McKinney, not because the gay panic defense was inadmissible in Wyoming, but because the killer’s “irresistible impulse” — in this case, allegedly brought on by the victim’s sexual identity — was not a part of the state’s insanity defense construct, according to the American Bar Association.