South Carolina man sentenced to life in prison for murder of Black transgender woman

FILE - This combination of undated selfie images provided courtesy of the Dime Doe family, shows Dime Doe, a Black transgender woman who was killed in 2019 in S.C. (Courtesy Dime Doe Family via AP, File)

A South Carolina man was sentenced to life in prison Thursday for the murder of a Black transgender woman. 

In February, a jury convicted Daqua Lameek Ritter for the 2019 killing of Dime Doe on all charges, including one hate crime count, one federal firearms count and one obstruction count.  

Ritter is the first person to be tried and convicted under a federal hate crime law named for Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. — men killed because of their sexual orientation and race — for violence against a transgender person. The 2017 murder of Mercedes Williamson, also a trans woman, was the first case prosecuted under the law that involved a victim targeted because of their gender identity. 

“Bias-motivated violence has no place in our society,” Benjamin C. Mizer, principal deputy associate attorney general, said Thursday in a statement. “With today’s sentencing, the defendant is being held accountable for the senseless murder of Dime Doe, a transgender woman of color. We hope that the verdict and sentence in this case provides Ms. Doe’s loved ones with some sense of comfort and demonstrates that the Justice Department will vigorously prosecute those who commit violent acts of hate against the LGBTQI+ community.” 

Doe grew up in South Carolina and transitioned after high school, Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement following Ritter’s sentencing. Doe became a hairdresser and started seeing Ritter, who hid his connection to Doe because he was in a relationship with another woman, Clarke said. 

When rumors about Ritter’s sexual relationship with Doe began circulating, “it made him irate,” Clarke said. In August 2019, he drove Doe to a remote part of Allendale, S.C., and shot her three times in the head, according to the Justice Department. 

At trial, federal prosecutors argued Ritter murdered Doe because of her gender identity, and a unanimous jury found Ritter guilty of a hate crime. 

“Dime Doe’s life mattered,” Clarke said Thursday. “This sentencing will not bring Dime Doe back, but it sends a clear message the Justice Department vigorously defends the civil rights of every American.” 

While violent crime in the U.S. has fallen in recent years, hate crimes have stayed largely unchanged, according to the FBI’s annual hate crime report released last month. More than 20 percent of hate crimes reported last year were motivated by anti-LGBTQ bias, according to the report. 

Transgender people are more than twice as likely to be victims of violence as cisgender people, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 2022. A report released the same year by Everytown for Gun Safety, a national gun control organization, found that known transgender homicides increased 93 percent between 2017 and 2021, most of them involving gun violence. 

At least 27 transgender and gender-nonconforming people in the U.S. were killed this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign, which has tracked incidents of fatal trans violence since 2013. Nearly half were Black trans women, and more than a third were killed by a romantic or sexual partner, friend or family member.