Was Justice Served?

Yesterday, CeCe McDonald was sentenced to 41 months in prison after pleading guilty to manslaughter.

Some background on CeCe case, in  a Huffington Post article by Laverne Cox,

…CeCe is an African-American woman from Minneapolis, Minn., and she is currently incarcerated, facing two counts of second-degree murder. On June 5, 2011 CeCe and a group of her friends, all of whom were LGBT youth of color, were walking in South Minneapolis when a group of white adults began screaming racist and transphobic slurs like “niggers,” “faggots” and “chicks with dicks” at the youth. According to reports CeCe stood up for herself and her friends, stating that they would not tolerate hate speech. Then one of the white adult women smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. The broken glass sliced all the way through CeCe’s cheek, lacerating a salivary gland. A fight ensued, resulting in the death of one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz. CeCe was the only person arrested. She was detained by the police for hours before questioning, and then she was placed in solitary confinement.

Also it was reported in another article that,

Witnesses at the scene reported that CeCe had turned away and was leaving the altercation, when Schmitz followed her in an aggressive, hostile fashion. Eventually, Schmitz was stabbed during the altercation with a pair of scissors in the chest and he bled to death at the scene. CeCe claims she acted in self-defense.

Consider that in Minnesota for self-defense you must…

Furthermore, it is important to know that the state of Minnesota has a “duty to retreat” in its self defense laws.  This means that if you are faced with a threat of danger you must first attempt to retreat.  Only when you are unable to retreat or otherwise avoid the danger can you use reasonable force to defend yourself. To claim self defense, you must use only reasonable force and you must have a reasonable belief of danger. This test for reasonableness is not based on what might have happened, but what actually did happened.

From the report of the witnesses, CeCe was “attempting to retreat” but was followed by the victim who then attacked her.

The victim was described as…

This was not the first time Dean Schmitz had expressed racist sentiments. Schmitz was a proud racist who had a swastika tattooed on his chest. Schmitz also had a history of violence, and had three prior convictions for assaulting his ex-girlfriend’s 14 year old daughter, assaulting his ex-girlfriend, and getting into a physical fight with his ex-girlfriend’s father.

However, during the pretrial hearings, the judge issued a number of rulings,

The defense motioned to admit evidence that the deceased, Dean Schmitz, had a swastika tattoo on his chest and prior convictions for domestic assault. The prior convictions cannot be brought up in court and the judge will rule on the swastika tattoo by Monday morning.

The defense motioned to admit the criminal theft record of witnesses against CeCe. These motions were denied. Another motion to admit the convictions of one witness against CeCe for providing false information to the police and using a false name was granted. Notably, however, the prosecution motioned to admit into evidence that CeCe was convicted of writing a bad check to speak to her dishonesty as a witness. This motion was granted.

After the judge’s rulings CeCe pled guilty to one count of manslaughter in the second degree due to negligence and a sentence of 41 months in prison including time served. Some people say that shows that she was guilty, why else would she accept the plea bargain. Well for one thing when giving a choice between life in prison and less than 3 years in prison, I think it is a logical choice when you are facing a stacked deck against you. When you are a young black trans-woman and all the evidence that could prove that you were defending yourself from a white racist was thrown out, what would you have done?

Update 6/8/12:

Media Ignores Rash of Assaults on Transgender Women
The Daily Beast
By Jay Michaelson
Jun 6, 2012

While the sentence has sparked outrage in some circles, it has gone virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media, as well as in the mainstream gay community, which has been consumed by the same-sex-marriage debate and the Tyler Clementi/Dharun Ravi case. But in fact, the CeCe McDonald case is part of a recent, horrifying spree of violence against transgender people, particularly trans people of color.

On April 29, 37-year-old Brandy Martell was shot dead in Oakland, in what has become a classic and tragic narrative of anti-trans violence: 3 a.m. Sunday morning, some men approach Martell, who’s sitting in a car with friends at a location known as a “safe space” for transgender women, and flirt with her. Martell discloses that she’s transgender, and the men leave. They return two hours later, shoot her in the genitals, and then in the chest. As of this writing, the killer has not been caught.

On April 16, Paige Clay, a transgender woman of color, was found murdered in a Chicago park. There are very few details about the killing, and no one has been arrested.

And on April 3, Coko Williams, another transgender woman of color, was shot to death in Detroit.

One case which did garner some mainstream media attention was that of Chrissy Lee Polis. Polis, a 24-year-old transwoman recovering from breast augmentation surgery, was emerging from the women’s restroom at a Baltimore-area McDonald’s in April 2011 when she was savagely beaten by two young women. A McDonald’s employee filmed the attack, laughed, and when another customer finally intervened to stop it, warned the attackers to leave before the police arrived.