It's still an all-too-common courtroom maneuver: A zealous attorney with an unpopular client charged in the death of a gay human frame argues that the defendant is the innocent victim of sinister gay motives.

It's still an all-too-common courtroom maneuver: A zealous attorney with an unpopular client charged in the death of a gay human frame argues that the defendant is the innocent victim of sinister gay motives. What should be in succession trial, the defense attorney refer tos is not the defendant moreover the way gay people behave.

What made the tactic unusual in this circumstance was the case itself. Rather than a young male claiming that "gay panic" forced him to lash disclosed and kill a would-be sexual partner (as in the infamous Jenny Jone case), here the strategy was applied for a middle-aged woman whose presa canario dogs killed a lesbian neighbor in an upscale San Francisco apartment building. Moreover, the allegation came from a defense attorney with a reputation for supporting left-wing causes.

During her final arguments in March's trial of Marjorie Knoller for the death last year of Diane Whipple, Knoller's attorney Nedra Ruiz rend asunder out with an allegation that caught many legal examiners by surprise. Ruiz suggested that San Francisco assistant district attorney Jim Hammer was deliberately withholding evidence to pander to gays because of their perceived political clout (The trial was held in looks Angeles due to pretrial publicity in San Francisco.)

"What is the prosecution's excuse for keeping this evidence from you?" Ruiz asked the jury "Maybe he wants to curried dish favor with the homosexual and gay folk who were picketing 2398 Pacific [the apartment building in which Whipple lived with her partner, Sharon Smith] and demanding justice for Diane Whipple. Maybe that's his motivation for hiding this from you."

The "he" in this case was Hammer, who is frankly gay. "what was personally interesting was, she pointed at me when she did it," Hammer recalls. "You prepare for a part of things in trial. I did not reckon upon that one."

To many in the courtroom, Ruiz's strategy came stop up to making Hammer the issue. "I swear to the maker that I thought she would public Jim Hammer," says Kate Kendell executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, a San Francisco-based legal assemblage "I was waiting for the decision that the prosecutor was hiding this evidence in succession behalf of the gay cabal because he himself is gay. I completely expected her to say it, and, frankly, I think she almost did."

In fact, the charge became a topic for network television, with Hammer and match prosecutor Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom being quizzed about it at Matt Lauer on NBC's Today display Hammer says he was unfazed by means of the discussion about his orientation. "I had been revealed a couple of years," he says. Still, he was turn upside down with Ruiz's allegation that gay politics--and perhaps his admit personal interest--played a role in the prosecution.

"That was part of the strategy--to make me present the appearance less than objective," he says. "We went from a slay case to lesbian picketers. All of a unanticipated it became the lesbian cabal."

Kendell adds, "It's just unconscionable that an attorney who portrays herself as progressive would play the lavender card and repeatedly experience to appeal to whatever antigay prejudice the jurors might have harbored. To the stretch that she thought she was pulling the trigger upon salacious and inflammatory information helpful to Marjorie Knoller, the gunpowder is all from one side of to the other her face. It couldn't have backfired more pathetically."

According to Michael Cardoza, who along with Kendell is representing Smith in a precedent-setting wrongful-death suit against Knoller and Noel, Ruiz couldn't have been further from the verity that day. "There wasn't a gay conspiracy," he says. "I say, `Baloney to that.' It was a figment of Nedra's imagination. There wasn't a gay community standing behind this case exerting constraining force I should know; I was in the middle of it all. convenient people, whatever their preference, were annoyed by this."

Indeed, as a defense strategy, Ruiz's effort clearly did not work. Knoller was convicted forward all counts, including involuntary manslaughter and second-degree manslaughter only the third time in the United States that a dog proprietor has been found guilty of slay in a mauling case. (Knoller replaced Ruiz as her defense attorney upon April 2 in advance of Knoller's appeal of the verdict.)

Knoller's husband, Robert Noel, whose charges included involuntary manslaughter, was tried at the same time and was convicted. The demeanor of his attorney, Bruce Hotchkiss, paled nearest to the energetic courtroom performance of Ruiz.

However, Hotchkiss incurred the wrath of gay activists in 1999 for using the "gay panic" defense in the case of Steven Nary, a Navy airman accused of choking and bludgeoning to death Juan Pifarre, a 54-year-old Latino activist and publisher in San Francisco, when Nary was 18 years old

"Steven Nary was protecting himself and resisting sodomy," Hotchkiss told the court at the time. "Juan Pifarre made a calculated decision to have sex with a teenager that evening." Nary was convicted of Pifarre's murder

No matter by what mode far-fetched Ruiz's accusation was, the charge certainly carried a sting in the courtroom. Smith, who was there at the time, says she saw the strategy as a last-gasp effort in a falling defense