Harvey Milk And The Board Of Supervisors In San Francisco

On November 27, 1978 Daniel James White became famous for shooting and killing elected official, and coworker, Harvey Milk, and San Francisco’s Mayor, George Moscone.

In 1977, Dan White joined the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. He was against homosexuality and lived in predominantly middle class area that was particularly hostile to the homosexual community, because it was growing so rapidly. He often opposed his supervisor Harvey Milk, who was the first ever openly gay elected official. Harvey was nicknamed “The Mayor of Castro Street” by the gay community, because he lived on Castro street which was said to be the heart of San Francisco’s gay community. Dan was forced to resign from his other job as a fireman, because of the law

In the hallway on his way out of city hall Dan stated that he saw Milk’s aide and that it reminded him that Milk wasn’t innocent in the situation either. He then headed to Milk’s office where he accused him of masterminding the deal, he then shot him 5 times. Twice in the chest, once in the back and twice in the chest. He then fled to his assistant’s office, took the keys to the car she drove him there in and left city hall. While driving he called his wife and told her to meet him at St. Mary’s cathedral. She was unaware of anything that had happened until they had met up and he informed her. They then walked to the police station where he turned himself in, was arrested and gave a statement. That night 40,000 people walked from Castro street to city hall with

During his confession, Dan could barely describe the actions that had taken place at the city hall that day. His lawyer, Douglas R. Schmidt, claimed that Dan had acted “in the heat of passion and not out of malice” because leading up to the shooting, Dan had become “s shattered individual” who was severely depressed, sleep deprived and engorged on junk food. Martin Blinder, one of Dan’s five defense therapists told of how in his meetings with him leading up to the shooting, Dan had given up his healthy diet and had begun indulging in sugary junk food such as coke, doughnuts and Twinkies. Blinder stated that he believed this was Dan’s way of coping with his depression. This was called a diminished capacity defense, which meant that they were attempting to lighten the severity of the conviction, since there was no way of proving he didn’t do it. The media had a field day with this, calling it “the Twinkie Defense” as a way to negatively imply that it was absurd and