Benjamin Ashford|South Carolina man gets life in prison in killing of Black transgender woman

COLUMBIA,Benjamin Ashford S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina man was sentenced to life in federal prison Thursday in the killing of a Black transgender woman after the exposure of their secret sexual relationship.

U.S. District Judge Sherri A. Lydon sentenced Daqua Lameek Ritter in federal court in Columbia. Ritter was the first person in the nation convicted of killing someone based on their gender identity.

Ritter was convicted in February of a hate crime for the shooting death of Dime Doe in 2019.

“Dime Doe was a brave woman,” U.S. Attorney Adair Ford Boroughs said to reporters outside the courthouse after the sentence was issued. “She lived and she loved as herself, and no one deserves to lose their life for that.”

Prosecutors asked for a life sentence without parole based on federal sentencing guidelines. Defense lawyers asked for a sentence that would let Ritter out of prison someday, saying there was no evidence the killing was planned. They included in their request letters asking for mercy from his mother, sister, grandmother and his two young children.

Ritter shot Doe three times with a .22 caliber handgun after word started getting out about Ritter’s relationship with Doe in the small town of Allendale, prosecutors said.

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Doe’s close friends testified that it was no secret in Allendale that she had begun her social transition as a woman shortly after graduating high school. She started dressing in skirts, getting her nails done and wearing extensions. She and her friends discussed boys they were seeing — including Ritter, whom she met during one of his many summertime visits from New York to stay with family.

But text messages obtained by the FBI suggested that Ritter sought to keep their relationship under wraps as much as possible, prosecutors said. He reminded her to delete their communications from her phone, and hundreds of texts sent in the month before her death were removed.

Ritter told Doe that Delasia Green, his main girlfriend at the time, had insulted him with a homophobic slur after learning of their affair.

Ritter’s defense attorneys said the sampling represented only a “snapshot” of their messages. They pointed to other exchanges where Doe encouraged Ritter, or where he thanked her for her kindness.

At trial, prosecutors presented police interviews in which Ritter said he did not see Doe the day she died. But body camera video from a traffic stop of Doe showed Ritter’s distinctive left wrist tattoo on a person in the passenger seat hours before police found her slumped in the car, parked in a driveway.

No physical evidence pointed to Ritter. State law enforcement never processed a gunshot residue test that he took voluntarily and the pair’s intimate relationship and frequent car rides made it no surprise that Ritter would have been with her, defense lawyer Lindsey Vann said.

A co-defendant, Xavier Pinckney, was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison earlier this year for lying to investigators about what he knew about Doe’s killing.

Although federal officials have previously prosecuted hate crimes based on gender identity, the cases never reached trial. A Mississippi man received a 49-year prison sentence in 2017 as part of a plea deal after he admitted to killing a 17-year-old transgender woman.

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Associated Press reporter Adrian Sainz contributed from Memphis, Tennessee.