A 65-year-old man in Florida says the impressive size of his penis is to blame for his girlfriend’s choking to death during sex and he wants to let the jury see his manhood for themselves to prove his case.
Richard Henry Patterson, who lives in Margate, not far from Fort Lauderdale, is accused of murder. He has always admitted that he choked his girlfriend, 60-year-old Francisca Martinez. But he did not say exactly how she choked to death. He now claims that she died while performing oral sex, and his attorneys wants a judge’s permission to show the jury his penis to prove that it is large to enough to cause an accidental choking death.
Indeed, Patterson’s attorney, Ken Padowitz, says the size of his client’s manhood is key to his defense.
Could the “large penis defense” have a chance of creating reasonable doubt in this case?
According to the autopsy, “Marquinez showed no signs of trauma — there were no bruises on her neck. But the autopsy also notes that the body was in an early stage of decomposition, making some bruising more difficult to detect with certainty,” according to the Florida Sun Sentinel.
The medical examiner was unable to reach a definitive conclusion about the cause and manner of death.
“It is rare in a murder case that the medical examiner can’t say the manner of death is a homicide,” Padowitz said.
Patterson told his daughter in a text message that he “did something bad.” He later told a friend, “I choked her. I choked Francisca.”
“He said he choked her,” said Padowitz. “He never said he strangled her.”
A British man, Philip Martins, attempted an identical defense in a 2011 murder case. He’s now serving a life sentence.
Penis size has been used as a legal argument in other cases, albeit in the opposite way. Last year, the lawyer for a Canadian man accused of choking and assaulting two sex workers in 2013 claims that he could not have committed the crimes because his penis is too small.
The two women testified that Jacques Rouschop, who’s been registered as a sex offender since 2005, paid them to perform oral sex in the backseat of his truck. According to New York magazine, one woman said he kept asking her to take off her pants and when she refused, he put her in a chokehold and flipped her on her back, repeatedly asking, “Who’s in charge?” She said she couldn’t breathe and may have lost consciousness but didn’t think she was raped.