- The first federal trial for a hate crime based on gender identity is scheduled to begin Tuesday in South Carolina.
- Daqua Ramek Ritter is accused of convincing a transgender woman to drive to a rural area in August 2019, where he shot her three times in the head before fleeing to New York.
- Prior to 2009, federal hate crime laws did not consider crimes motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
The first federal trial for a gender identity-based hate crime is scheduled to begin Tuesday in South Carolina, where a man is accused of killing a Black transgender woman and fleeing to New York.
The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that in August 2019, Daqua Ramek Ritter seduced a woman, anonymously referred to in court documents as “Dime Do,” to drive him to a sparsely populated, rural county in South Carolina. He claims that he induced her to go there. Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where Ritter was arrested last January, said Ritter shot her in the head after arriving at a secluded area near her relatives’ home. He said he fired three shots.
Attacks against the LGBTQ+ community have skyrocketed in recent years. For decades, transgender women of color have faced disproportionately high rates of violence and hate crimes, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The number of gender-based hate crimes reported by the FBI in 2022 increased by 37% from the previous year.
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Until 2009, federal hate crime laws did not take into account crimes motivated by a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The first conviction of a victim targeted because of her gender identity was in 2017. A Mississippi man who pleaded guilty to killing a 17-year-old transgender woman has been sentenced to 49 years in prison.
View of the Matthew J. Perry Jr. Courthouse in Columbia, South Carolina. The first federal trial for a gender-based hate crime is scheduled to begin in court on February 20, with Daqua Ramek Ritter accused of killing a black transgender woman and fleeing to New York. (AP Photo/James Pollard)
But Tuesday is the first time such a case will go to trial, South Carolina Assistant District Attorney Brooke Andrews said. Never before has a federal jury decided whether to punish someone for a crime based on the victim’s gender identity.
The government said Ritter’s friends and girlfriend learned of Ritter’s sexual relationship with a woman a month before his murder. The defense said the two were close friends and related through Ritter’s aunt and the woman’s uncle.
Prosecutors believe the revelations, which led to Ritter’s girlfriend hurling homophobic slurs at him, left him “extremely upset”.
“His crimes were motivated by anger at being ridiculed for having a sexual relationship with a transgender woman,” government lawyers said in a filing last January.
They said Ritter lied to state police about his whereabouts that day and fled South Carolina. Prosecutors said the suspect enlisted others to help him burn clothes, hide the murder weapon and mislead police about his whereabouts on the day of the murder.
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Government lawyers plan to present witness testimony about Ritter’s whereabouts and his text messages with the woman, in which he allegedly persuaded her to take the ride. The evidence also includes a video taken at a traffic light showing a man in the woman’s car hours before she died.
Other evidence includes DNA taken from the woman’s car and testimony from multiple people who say Ritter personally confessed to the shooting.
Ritter’s lawyers said it was not surprising that Ritter might have had something to do with the woman’s car, given their close relationship. The defense argued there was no physical evidence pointing to Ritter as the perpetrator. Additionally, the defense said witnesses’ claims that Ritter tried to dispose of evidence were inconsistent.
Prosecutors do not plan to seek the death penalty, but if a jury convicts Ritter, he could receive multiple life sentences. In addition to the hate crime charge, Ritter faces two other charges: murder with a firearm and misleading investigators.
