Deleted texts helped convince jurors man killed trans woman because of gender ID, foreperson says
A South Carolina man, Daqua Ritter, was found guilty of killing a Black transgender woman, Dime Doe, in the nation’s first federal trial over a hate crime based on gender identity.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — When jurors first began weighing the fate of a man charged with murdering the transgender woman he’d been seeing secretly, they had little problem concluding that he fired the gun, the jury foreperson said.
The most difficult task was determining that he was driven by hate, as the Department of Justice alleged, Dee Elder, a transgender woman from Aiken, South Carolina, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
“Motive is just a harder thing to prove,” Elder said. “How do you look between someone’s ears?”
Elder reached out to the AP after she and 11 other jurors found Daqua Ritter guilty of shooting Dime Doe three times on Aug. 4, 2019, because of her gender identity, bringing to an end the first federal trial over a bias-motivated crime of that sort.
Dime Doe, a Black transgender woman, was fatally shot in August 2019. Courtesy Dime Doe Family via APFamiliar with the difficulties presented by society for transgender people, Elder, 41, said she was compelled to discuss the case given its historic nature.
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