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 Md. Quandary: Where To Place Transsexual
Convict
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
Posted: January 22, 2007 - 5:00 pm ET
(Baltimore, Maryland) Officials at the Maryland
Division of Corrections say they have no policies on whether transsexual inmates
should be housed with male or female prisoners.
The situation arose following the conviction of
Dee Deirdre Farmer, 41,on charges of faking her own death to avoid prosecution.
Officials will not say where Farmer has been temporarily placed while they
determine where she should be incarcerated for her 28 month sentence except to
say she is at the Maryland
Division of Correction.
Farmer has been freed from prison last year
because she was dying of AIDS. She had been serving a sentence on other charges.
When she faced new criminal charges Farmer forged
a Baltimore Circuit Court order to change the death certificate of a man named
Charles Smith to reflect that Farmer was the person who had died.
A worker at the
State Division of Vital Records noticed the alteration on the document and reported it to the Attorney General’s
Office.
These are not Farmer's first offences nor her
battle over prison housing.
In a landmark case, Farmer sued
federal prison officials over a 1989 rape that occurred about a week after
Farmer entered a federal maximum-security prison for men in Terre Haute, Ind.
Farmer had arrived with male sex organs and breast implants, after undergoing
estrogen therapy.
The lawsuit claimed the government
had violated Farmer's constitutional right to be free of cruel and unusual
punishment by ignoring the risk that a feminine-appearing inmate would be raped
by other prisoners.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in
1994 said that prison officials can sometimes be held liable for inmate assaults
revived Farmer's lawsuit, which had been dismissed by lower courts. After the
Supreme Court decision, however, she lost the case at trial.
©365Gay.com 2007
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