In hon­or of Pride Month and com­mem­o­rat­ing the 55th anniver­sary of the Stonewall upris­ing, the Death Penalty Information Center is pleased to present a new resource about how use of the death penal­ty affects LGBTQ+ peo­ple. We take a com­pre­hen­sive look at top­ics rang­ing from America’s his­to­ry of pun­ish­ing queer sex with exe­cu­tion, to dis­crim­i­na­to­ry com­ments made against queer defen­dants in cap­i­tal tri­als, to the chal­lenges of gen­der tran­si­tion on death row. 

As ear­ly as 1636, the American colonies passed laws pun­ish­ing queer sex with the death penal­ty. It was not until 1873 that the last state, South Carolina, removed the death penal­ty as a pun­ish­ment for sodomy. Today, twelve coun­tries around the world have laws on the books autho­riz­ing the death penal­ty for queer sex­u­al activ­i­ty. Studies show that LGBTQ+ American pris­on­ers remain at a height­ened risk for sex­u­al assault and violent victimization. 

There is evi­dence of explic­it bias. ​“Tush hog,” ​“fairy,” and ​“hard­core les­bian” are only some of the deroga­to­ry terms that attor­neys have used to refer to defen­dants in open court dur­ing cap­i­tal tri­als. One juror said that if he thought some­one was gay, he would ​“per­son­al­ly believe that per­son is moral­ly depraved enough that he might lie, might steal, might kill”; he was nev­er­the­less seat­ed to decide the fate of a gay defen­dant, who was sen­tenced to death by a vote of 7 – 5. A judge who sen­tenced a gay defen­dant to death had pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten a let­ter telling his own gay son that he hoped he would ​“die in prison like all the rest of [his] f*ggot friends.”

The dis­crim­i­na­tion LGBTQ+ peo­ple face in American soci­ety con­tin­ues into the court­room, despite the Constitution’s promise of equal pro­tec­tion of the laws. Every par­tic­i­pant in the legal sys­tem brings their own per­son­al beliefs and bias­es into a pro­ceed­ing — and queer defen­dants suf­fer the consequences. 

Learn more at our LGBTQ+ People page.

Note on Terminology

We use the words ​“LGBTQ+” and ​“queer” as umbrel­la terms to refer to peo­ple who iden­ti­fy as les­bian, gay, bisex­u­al, trans­gen­der, or anoth­er non-het­ero­sex­u­al sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion or non-cis­gen­der iden­ti­ty. We are mind­ful of the his­to­ry of the word ​“queer” as a slur and rec­og­nize that not every­one feels com­fort­able with its use. We have decid­ed to use ​“queer” based on its grow­ing pos­i­tive use among peo­ple with these iden­ti­ties and its fre­quent use in the schol­ar­ly sources we relied on in our research. We intend it as a neu­tral, respect­ful descriptor only. 

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