A man in South Carolina has been found guilty on all charges of murdering a Black transgender woman. In the first ever federal trial for a hate crime based on gender identity, Daqua Lameek Ritter (26) was tried for the 2019 slaying of a trans woman identified only as Dime Doe.
According to the Department of Justice, Ritter and Doe likely had a sexual relationship unknown to Ritter’s girlfriend. When the relationship was discovered, Ritter drove Doe to an isolated area and shot her three times. Prosecutors noted that Ritter’s girlfriend and friends called him homophobic slurs and said that “(Ritter’s) crime was motivated by his anger at being mocked for having a sexual relationship with a transgender woman.”
Ritter’s trial was historic, as it was the first related to violence against a trans person to be held under the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. While the act was used in several previous cases involving anti-transgender bias, none of those cases had gone to trial until now. After four hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously found Ritter guilty of committing a hate crime, as well as two other counts involving alleged murder with a firearm and lying to law enforcement.
Trans women, and especially trans women of color, consistently find themselves the primary targets of anti-queer and anti-trans hate crimes. In the past decade, over 80% of all transgender victims of fatal violence were trans women and specifically over 60% were Black trans women. In 2023 alone, a trans person has been murdered roughly every nine days. The trial for the murder of Dime Doe is a key moment in trans history. Kristen Clarke, Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said it well in her statement on the case: “The jury’s verdict sends a clear message: Black trans lives matter, bias-motivated violence will not be tolerated, and perpetrators of hate crimes will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
