From
left: Nikki Kuhnhausen, Jaylow McGlory, and Zoe Spears
Most
transgender homicide victims in the U.S. are Black women, and most of them knew
their killers, but the legal system has failed them in many ways and few of
their cases result in murder convictions, according to a new analysis by Insider.
The
publication looked at 175 killings of trans and gender-nonconforming,
nonbinary, and two-spirit people from 2017 through 2021. (The Advocate also
independently tracks killings among this population.)
Insider found
that there had been murder convictions in only 16 percent of these cases and a
hate-crime conviction in only one — the death of Nikki Kuhnhausen, a 17-year-old who was killed in
Washington State in 2019. Her killer, David Bogdanov, was convicted in 2021 of
second-degree murder and malicious harassment, the latter being a hate crime.
He received the maximum sentence of 19 years and six months.
“It’s even
disturbing when I’m around like a gay person or somebody bi or transsexual or
something,” Bogdanov told a police officer, according to Insider.
Hate-crime
charges have been filed in only two other deaths in the period covered by
Insider — those of Serena Angelique Velázquez and Layla Pelaez, friends
who were killed in Puerto Rico in 2020. Those charges are still pending.
The
publication noted that in many cases, police don’t take trans people’s identity
or relationships seriously. When Jaylow McGlory was shot to death in Louisiana
in 2017, she was widely misgendered, and police and prosecutors didn’t
acknowledge that she was in a relationship with her accused killer, Desmond
Harris. Harris pleaded self-defense and was acquitted. This is one of many
deaths of trans people involving intimate partner violence.
Sex workers
are particularly vulnerable members of the trans population. Insider pointed
out the deaths of Zoe Spears and Ashanti Carmon, killed within months
and within blocks of each other in 2019 in a suburb of Washington, D.C. “The
police continue to deny a connection between the two killings, something
community members have trouble believing,” Insider reports.
Police and the
legal system have failed in other ways as well, according to the publication.
In several cases where trans people have been killed by police, no charges have
been filed, it reports. And in the case of Kenne McFadden, killed in 2017 in San Antonio, Mark
Daniel Lewis told police, “Do you know the guy I was with on the River Walk?
Well, I kind of pushed him in the river.” Prosecutors didn’t think a jury would
sympathize with McFadden because she was trans, and a judge accepted Lewis’s
plea that he acted in self-defense. In nearly two-thirds of the cases studied,
victims were misgendered or deadnamed by police.
Leaders in the
criminal justice system “do not value trans lives, do not care to understand
them, do not have any interest in humanizing these individuals as victims, and
instead often really view them as blameworthy,” criminologist Rayna Momen
told Insider.
The
publication also pointed out that Colorado Springs, which has a large Christian
right presence, was a hotbed of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment long before the mass
shooting at Club
Q, its only LGBTQ+ nightclub, last November. And the accused shooter
often used a common homophobic slur and ran a website riddled with violent
anti-LGBTQ+ and racist language, Insider reports.
But LGBTQ+
residents of Colorado Springs are vowing to forge on. “The shooting was a
tragedy, but it strengthened their enemy,” local trans woman Erin told Insider. “We
still want to come together — come together despite adversity.”
SOURCE: ADVOCATE
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