Imagine there's this 15-year-old mean girl who goes to a middle school in California. She dresses like a slut and likes to tease the boys. There's this one boy at her school, age 14, that she singles out and picks on. The mean girl flirts with the boy even though it makes him uncomfortable. She goes out of her way to make lewd remarks to him, she seems to relish the boy's discomfort, and she regularly humiliates him in front of their classmates. One day the boy tells a friend that he's going to bring a gun to school the next day and kill the mean girl. And the next day the boy walks up behind the mean girl in a computer lab, removes a gun from his backback, and points the gun at the back of the mean girl's head. The mean girl doesn't even know the boy is standing behind her. The boy fires two bullets into the mean girl's head.

The sexually-charged teasing is easy to imagine—that sort of shit goes on in middle and high schools all the time (most of it directed at girls)—and so, sadly, is the shooting. What's impossible to imagine is what happens at the boy's trial: the jury deadlocks over manslaughter charges. Not charges of premeditated murder, which this clearly was, but manslaughter. A mistrial is declared. Prosecutors refuse to say whether they intend to retry the boy—again for manslaughter, not premeditated murder.

That's essentially what happened in California yesterday when a jury deadlocked over manslaughter charges brought against Brandon McInerney in the slaying of gay classmate. Larry King—if you accept the arguments made by McInerney's defense team—dressed provocatively and made lewd remarks to McInerney. McInerney responded by killing King in cold blood, a murder that was clearly premeditated. But that little faggot was hitting on boys and wearing provocative clothes, McInerney's lawyers argued, and so he had it coming. The gay panic defense that didn't work for the men who murdered Matthew Shepard in 1998 worked for the boy who murdered of Larry King in 2011.

It's impossible to imagine a jury failing to convict a boy who murdered a female classmate for sexually harassing him, or a jury failing to convict a girl who murdered a male classmate for sexually harassing her, I guess that means that only gay kids can be killed for making unwanted advances and crude remarks to classmates. In California. In 2011.