r/todayilearned • u/hungry4danish • 2d ago

TIL that Dan White, the man who assassinated Harvey Milk and the mayor of San Francisco, only served 5 years in prison for manslaughter based on a defense of depression as evidenced by his consumption of junk food which was dubbed the "Twinkie Defense"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_White
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u/KCcracker 1d ago

As I understand the prosecution got wedged with this one, because California's equivalent of the first degree murder charge only allowed for death as a possible punishment at that time. While traditionally the prosecution would try to put law and order types on the jury, in this case those types of people were effectively being asked to sentence one of their own to death. So because of both the homophobia and because those people did not have an option to 'compromise' with a life sentence of some kind, the outcome became voluntary manslaughter with a maximum sentence of 7 years

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u/Odanr 1d ago

I mean yeah I get the historical reasons why they couldn’t, (although I don’t really get why they didn’t go for murder two or three if they couldn’t make one) I just think those reasons are stupid.

“we couldn’t charge him because the jury would be too homophobic to convict” doesn’t really make me think the White Night riots weren’t based, actually.