A Tennessee court has overturned the conviction of a man who killed a Black transgender woman, ruling that a lower court “erred” by preventing the killer from using the victim’s trans identity in his defense.
Samuel Ward Jr. shot Paris Lee six times outside her Memphis home in June 2022, according to the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office. He then drove 30 minutes home, leaving her to die. Ward was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in May 2025.
But the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals in Jackson overturned that conviction on Monday and ordered a retrial. The trial court’s judge had disallowed the defense from presenting the victim’s identity as a transgender woman in its arguments.
“The trial court erred by excluding evidence of the victim’s assigned sex at birth, [and] the evidence was insufficient to support [Ward’s] conviction,” reads the Monday appellate court decision. “Because we conclude that the trial court erred… we reverse and remand this case for a new trial.”
The defense had argued it would be more reasonable for Ward to fear Lee if jurors knew she was assigned male at birth, and said jurors would be more prejudiced against Ward for killing a cisgender woman, according to Jamie Satterfield, an independent journalist who first reported the ruling.
The gay panic defenses has not gone away. Also, this rings of saying its not murder because transgender people aren’t people.
The decision to exclude certain facts is generally made knowingly and carefully. The court, in this case, correctly judged that the average Tennessee jury would be unlikely to rule on the actual legal merits of this case if they knew the victim was trans (or, to the average redneck shit stain from Tennessee, “not actually human”).
In court, both sides can submit something as evidence and the other side can object to it. It’s then up to the judge to sustain or overrule the objections. The jury is instructed to deliberate only on the items received by the court and any witness testimony, which again can have some answers or questions objected or struck from the record.
If the defense wanted to submit it then, it was objected, then the judge did make the call. However, the defense could also just be incompetent and left it out and decided to appeal based on that fact being left out.