A South Carolina man was sentenced to life in prison Thursday for the murder of a Black transgender woman.
A jury convicted Daqua Lameek Ritter, whom police say shot Dime Doe in August 2019, on all charges, including one hate crime count, one federal firearms count and one obstruction count.
Ritter was the first person tried and convicted under federal hate crime law for fatal violence against a trans person.
“Bias-motivated violence has no place in our society,” Benjamin C. Mizer, principal deputy associate attorney general, said in a statement Thursday. “With today’s sentencing, the defendant is being held accountable for the senseless murder of Dime Doe, a transgender woman of color. We hope that the verdict and sentence in this case provides Ms. Doe’s loved ones with some sense of comfort and demonstrates that the Justice Department will vigorously prosecute those who commit violent acts of hate against the LGBTQI+ community.”
Doe grew up in South Carolina and transitioned after high school, Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement following Ritter’s sentencing. Doe became a hairdresser and then started seeing Ritter. But Ritter wanted to hide his connection to Doe because he was in a relationship with another woman, Clarke said.
Evidence presented at trial showed that Ritter became upset when rumors about his sexual relationship with Doe began to circulate, according to the Justice Department. In August 2019, he drove Doe to a remote location and shot her three times, Clarke said.
Clarke said the verdict was secured under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, which expanded the federal hate crime statute to include gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability. It was named after Shepard, a 21-year-old gay student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie who was murdered in 1998, and James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old Black man who was killed by white supremacists in Texas that same year.
“The sentencing will not bring Dime Doe back, but it sends a clear message the Justice Department vigorously defends the civil rights of every American,” Clarke said.
Following Doe’s death, her friends and family said on social media that she had a “bright personality” and was “the best to be around,” according to the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group.
“If I knew Friday was my last time seeing you, I would have hugged you even tighter,” one friend wrote in 2019, according to HRC.
Fatal violence against trans people, particularly Black trans women, has increased in recent years, according to the Human Rights Campaign, which has been tracking the violence since 2013. Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes rose more than 19% from 2021 to 2022, with hate crimes motivated by anti-trans bias rising more than 35%, according to the FBI’s annual hate crime report released last year.
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