Famous transgender inmate charged with raping woman months before judge issues plea

Three days after a federal judge dismissed a challenge to a California law that allows inmates with intact male genitalia and hormone levels to select women’s prisons based on their gender identity, prosecutors presented their evidence of rape allegations against an incarcerated man transferred under that law who… The judge was also allowed to intervene in defense of SB 132.

U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston was “obviously unaware of this rape case going through the state courts” since March, said executive director Sharon Byrne of the Women’s Liberation Front, which recounted the lawsuit filed by female inmates Janine Chandler, Krystal Gonzalez, Tomiekia Johnson and Nadia Romero Just the news On Monday.

Byrne said WoLF is considering its options in response to President Biden’s nominee’s decision.

“We can amend the complaint for some of the claims and for some of the defendants,” but otherwise they would have to appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, she said.

“The case was dismissed without consideration of constitutional arguments after years of delay,” WoLF said in an email Friday, referencing its press conference earlier in the day “to raise awareness that rape does indeed occur in women’s detention facilities.” comes,” according to SB 132, men with “prior sexual assault.”

WoLF joined Woman II Woman, a non-profit ex-offender organization that withdrew from the SB 132 challenge two years ago, outside Tremaine Deon Carroll’s preliminary hearing on two counts of forcible rape and one count of “dissuading a witness from testifying.” “.

Byrne said advocacy group Women Are Real was also in attendance.

Gender critical news organization Reduxx has released a portion of Carroll’s criminal complaint that is not available in the online filing. Madera County prosecutors allege that Carroll raped a woman identified as Jane Doe “on or about January 30.”

Carroll was transferred to the Central California Women’s Facility in August 2021, seven months after SB 132 was enacted and two decades into a 25-year, three-term prison sentence.

The inmate filed “dozens” of complaints alleging “mistreatment, discrimination and even sexual abuse” by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation employees before the law took effect, with the “vast majority” using male pronouns Reduxxis a look back at Carroll’s incarceration story.

Fourth wave feminist publication 4W identified Carroll’s alleged victim under the alias “Natalie,” who had been Carroll’s cellmate “for only a few days when she said he attacked and raped her in the shower.”

The Transgender Legal Center, ACLU of Southern California and Lambda Legal successfully represented Carroll in a petition for intervention by transgender inmates, which Thurston cited in his ruling. They did not respond Monday to questions about how they now view representation for Carroll, who was returned to a men’s prison.

“I know what it feels like to live in fear and carry the burden of past abuse at the hands of men,” Carroll, identified as “Tremayne,” said in the statement dated May 9, 2022. “Because I have lived it, I can I sympathize with the plaintiffs in this regard. But I’m not a threat to them.”

Mental health magazine MindSiteNews published a series of interviews with transgender inmates, including Carroll, last fall.

Thurston’s May 14 ruling provides a blueprint for states seeking to protect themselves from legal challenges to housing self-identified transgender women in women’s prisons: Create an administrative process to approve transfers on a case-by-case basis before enacting a more comprehensive law, and do so without worrying about waiving legal immunity under the 11th Amendment.

Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office did not argue that CDCR enjoyed immunity from the plaintiffs’ federal claims, only their state claims. One of his arguments was that being incarcerated with a person of the opposite sex was like sharing a cell with someone of a different race.

But Thurston raised the issue on his own initiative, or “sua sponte,” citing a 9th Circuit precedent from last year that said waiving 11th Amendment immunity and consenting to federal jurisdiction was “clearly expressed.” and does not have to be “implied”.

It is irrelevant that “CDCR appeared and defended this lawsuit by filing a motion to dismiss,” the judge said.

The judge began several pages of lengthy footnotes, saying she could not redress the plaintiffs’ expressed grievances because the law merely expanded the scope of an administrative proceeding prior to SB 132 by at least three years.

Redress “requires that the court be able to grant relief by exercising his power, not by the convincing or even awe-inspiring effect of the opinion explain the exercise of his power,” Thurston wrote.

Restoring the “pre-SB 132 status quo,” under which men in women’s prisons lived “only on a case-by-case basis, taking into account objective factors relevant to the safety of women”—conditions eliminated by the law—would require Thurston CDCR orders two dozen to several hundred inmates to “identify, locate and remove,” a separation of powers issue.

That would also go further than what the plaintiffs are seeking – an injunction against “further enforcement or implementation” of the law, not the pre-SB 132 regulations themselves – and leave the current “gender non-conforming incarcerated individuals” at CCWF, said the judge.

Thurston also lacks the authority to address allegations that CDCR officials violated plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by changing male to female references in their administrative complaints about transgender inmates, she said.

The plaintiffs repeatedly made allegations that did not provide “sufficient detail” about their own injuries, including increased stress on prison staff as they interacted with male inmates, female inmates setting up “sleep schedules” to protect against male rape, and speculative apprehension That the prison would cut down the only trees for inmates so that men couldn’t process them into shivs, Thurston wrote.

They also “cannot plausibly claim that CDCR has motivated – and does not currently – motivate incarcerated transgender people to sexually harass and assault them,” nor do they do so because doing so is “not bound by the law itself “would be,” said the judge.

She rejected the 8th Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment claim because no substantive justification was provided for the alleged “significantly increased risk of sexual” harassment and assault from transgender inmates. Merely citing previous assaults is not enough, Thurston said.

The publication 4W cited a 2021 Bureau of Prisons report that found half of male inmates who identified as women were sex offenders, and CDCR’s own figures that a third of men seeking a transfer to the women’s prisons in his women’s prisons were also sex offenders.