Transgender woman files second lawsuit against Georgia Department of Corrections for sexual assault

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Transgender woman files second lawsuit against Georgia Department of Corrections for sexual assault

Amelia Rude | U. Pittsburgh School of Law, US

November 24, 2020 05:30:30 pm

Five years after her initial lawsuit, which led to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) declaring that prison officials must treat gender dysphoria, Ashley Diamond, a transgender woman, brought suit against the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) Monday.

According to the complaint, Ashley “is once again trying to survive brutal and unrelenting abuse and mistreatment as a result of [the GDC’s] actions and omissions.” Her initial abuse ended after she was released from the GDC to parole in August 2015. However, a recent parole violation has led her to be sexually victimized in the custody of GDC once again. Defendants named in the suit include Georgia Statewide Mental Health Director Javel Jackson, Medical Director of the GDC Sharon Lewis, Prison Rape Elimination Act Coordinator Grace Atchison, and GDC Commissioner Timothy Ward.

Diamond sent seven letters and two emails regarding constitutional violations between May 1 and November 6, 2020, “repeatedly notif[ying] Defendants of the serial sexual assaults, abuses, and suffering Ms. Diamond was experiencing,” which did not lead to any meaningful intervention. Diamond has been sexually assaulted 14 times while in GDC custody, eight of these instances during her current housing arrangement. Additionally, the GDC refuses to house her in a women’s prison, and she cannot access any safe housing aside from solitary confinement. Diamond’s complaint argues that the sexual assault of transgender women in prison is foreseeable, and that the GDC failed to mitigate this risk, in spite of their knowledge of its existence.

In addition to failing to intervene in the sexual assaults, the GDC has refused Diamond treatment for her gender dysphoria, which has led to instances of attempted self-castration, suicide attempts, anxiety, and depression. Following the 2015 case, “[t]he abuse and neglect that Ms. Diamond has experienced are all the more egregious because Defendants have willfully ignored a prior judicial finding that the very same conduct Defendants repeat qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment and a violation of clearly established constitutional rights.”

Diamond’s placement in the men’s prison has separated her “from similarly situated cisgender women (i.e., non-transgender women) who are housed in women’s facilities and therefore shielded from sexual predation from incarcerated cisgender men.”

Diamond’s case will take place during a continued investigation by the DOJ into Georgia’s mistreatment of LGBTQ+ individuals in the prison system.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.