Fridae

The Tampa, Florida police pension board voted 8-0 on Wednesday to deny Detective Mickie Mashburn pension benefits from her slain partner of 10 years, reports The Tampa Tribune. The board has awarded Marrero's pension benefits to her family.

Forty-year-old officer Lois Marrero who was shot dead while pursuing a suspect in an armed bank robbery on July 6 is the first woman to die in the line of duty at Tampa Police Department.

While the police department's pension program provides surviving spouses with lifetime benefits, Tampa law does not recognize same-sex partners as legal spouses.

The tragedy has sparked debates about the lack of legal standing same-sex couples have in pension and other benefits matters.

Advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) are upset that despite Mashburn's 10-year relationship with Marrero, the surviving partner has been ruled ineligible to collect her partner's pension.

While conservatives maintain that in most parts of the US pension benefits go only to a surviving spouse not to a life partner, the same should apply to both heterosexual as well as gay couples.

However, gay activists are quick to point out that "[pension] benefits are a question of basic equality."

"Gay and lesbian couples cannot legally marry in Florida or any other state, and therefore can never qualify for pension benefits." Says HRC Executive Director Elizabeth Birch in a statement.

The state government has sent US$25,000 to Mashburn two weeks after the shooting. The US$25,000 payment, the maximum permitted, comes from the state's crime victims compensation fund, was approved by the guardian of the fund, Attorney General Bob Butterworth.

Rodney Doss, director of the Division of Victims' Services for Butterworth's office said the payment to Mashburn was not to make a statement, but merely follows the guidelines under which money is dispersed to homicide victims' families.

"This is not a death benefit, this is not an insurance program," Doss said. "The specific benefit that was issued in this particular case was for loss of support."

Marrero's death "constitutes a loss of support which will nowhere come close to equating what the officer's contribution to this life partnership may have been in the end," he added.