COLUMBIA, S.C. — The nation’s first hate crime trial for a gender-based murder began Tuesday in Columbia.
Dime Doe, a transgender woman, was found dead in her car off a country road in Allendale, South Carolina, around 6 p.m. on Aug. 4, 2019. She had been shot three times in the head from close range.
Just hours earlier, Doe had been stopped for speeding. In drizzling rain, an Allendale sheriff’s deputy who knew Doe recorded himself on body camera giving Doe a speeding ticket. She texted her mom, “I’m alright. Just a $72 ticket.” It was the last time anyone heard from her.
Sitting in the reclined passenger seat, his face hidden from the deputy’s body camera, was the man that federal prosecutors say killed her: Daqua Ritter.
While not blood relatives, family members of Ritter and Doe were dating, and the two called each other cousins. They attended school together at Doe’s suggestion, according to filings, and when Ritter got into a serious car wreck, Doe helped him get a lawyer who won him a settlement, according to court filings.
But in 2023, Ritter was charged with one count of bias-motivated murder, one count of possession of a deadly weapon during a crime and one count of obstruction of justice.
The case, which is before federal Judge Sherri Lydon, is being prosecuted by 1st Assistant U.S. Attorney Brook Andrews and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Ben Garner and Elle Klein from the U.S. Attorneys Office for South Carolina. They are joined by Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Mann from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
Ritter appeared in court Tuesday wearing leg irons, but no handcuffs, dressed in a black sweater over a blue collared shirt and tie. He was accompanied by his attorneys Lindsey Vann and Joshua Kendrick.
Prosecutors have said that Ritter was in a secret, sexual relationship with Doe and was driven to kill her by shame because he had been exposed for having a homosexual relationship. “Ritter was motivated by the deep-seated fear of the judgment and ridicule he would experience,” Garner said in opening statements.
Federal prosecutors have alleged that Ritter lured Doe to a meetup using a messaging app on his friend Xavier Pinckney’s cellphone. After Doe picked up Ritter, he shot her three times and left her car on Concord School Road in a rural, wooded area with no businesses or homes nearby, prosecutors say. They have placed Doe’s death between 3:34 and 4:40 p.m.
Ritter then walked to his uncle’s house and asked for a ride back to town. Witnesses allegedly saw him burn his clothes later that night, prosecutors say.
“Ritter’s actions that day were as deliberate as they were deadly,” Garner said.
The unique nature of the case meant that the jurors and alternates, comprising eleven women and three men, were asked about their potential opinions and biases towards transgender and homosexual people.
On Tuesday, defense attorneys stayed away from Doe’s gender identity. While federal hate crime laws have previously been used in the prosecution of crimes on the basis of gender identity, Ritter’s case is the first time that a murder on the basis of gender identity has been tried in federal court. Previous cases, including one against Joshua Brandon Vallum of Mississippi who murdered a transgender woman he once dated, have all ended in pleas.
While being found guilty of a federal hate crime can enhance the sentence of certain crimes, including attempted murder, under federal sentencing guidelines, first degree murder is already punishable by the death penalty or life in prison. Prosecutors in this case have said they are not seeking the death penalty.
South Carolina has no state hate crimes laws.
For their part, defense attorneys have sought to cast the case as a “whodunnit,” full of “unbelievable and un-credible” witnesses.
“The question is not why he killed her, it is if he killed her,” said defense attorney Vann in her opening statement, “and the answer is no.”
Instead, defense attorneys have argued that the insular culture of rumor, gossip and suspicion of law enforcement in the town of Allendale, with a population of roughly 2,600, led suspicion to fall on Ritter, a relative outsider who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and only stayed in the town in the summer when visiting with his grandmother.
On the stand, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division Agent Lawrence Wiggins, now the chief of police for the town of Allendale, the county seat, said that Ritter first came to investigators’ attention when onlookers at the crime scene, which included members of Doe’s family, suggested that Ritter might be involved in her death.
But under cross examination from Ritter’s other defense attorney, Kendrick, Wiggins admitted there was a “reluctance” to talk to law enforcement in Allendale, and police had to talk to residents “two or three times before they’ll tell you the truth.”
In filings, defense attorneys said Ritter was “unbothered” by the rumors that the two were engaged in a sexual relationship.
Wiggins, the fourth witness called Tuesday, said that suspicion about Ritter grew when they interviewed him at his grandmother’s home that night. The former SLED agent said that tattoos and marks on Ritter’s wrists matched those of the passenger’s arms seen on the body cam footage of Doe’s traffic stop. Without prompting, Ritter also told investigators that he had rushed home to “let his people know he was ok,” and then told them that he was leaving soon to return to New York. The address on his driver’s license was from his uncle’s house, on Concord School Road, only half a mile from where Doe’s body had been found.
“At this point I started to feel that he might be important to the case,” Wiggins said. “Rising to the level of a person of interest.”
In body cam footage from the interview, Ritter can be heard denying that he saw Doe at all that day before later changing his story to admit that he had seen her briefly in the company of another friend, Parris Lee. Lee was shot and killed at a gas station in July 2023. The killings are unrelated, according to law enforcement.
But defense attorneys were quick to point out that despite his lying, Ritter was cooperative, writing out a statement and even agreeing to be tested for gunshot shot residue.
During Ritter’s first interview with law enforcement, his grandmother handed him a Bible to swear on.
“If you’re lying, you’ll be in trouble,” she warned him.
What’s next?
So far the jury has heard evidence from first responders and the initial investigators. Jurors have seen footage of the crime scene, including Doe’s body. As the pictures were revealed, some members of her family broke into sobs and left the courtroom.
Central to the prosecutors’ case is a map of places they say Ritter visited the day of the murder, as well as locations he claimed he visited. Investigators also read texts from Doe’s phone to a device they say belonged to Ritter’s friend Pinckney.
The messages indicate that an unknown texter arranged to meet up with Doe through a messaging app.
In October, Pinckney pleaded guilty to assisting Ritter the day of the murder and lying to federal agents about seeing Ritter or using his phone to call and text Doe on the day she was killed.
One key witness is Delasia Green, Ritter’s former girlfriend. Green is currently being represented by Columbia attorney Victor K. Li after she was charged with trying to evade a law enforcement subpoena to testify. In a warrant for her detention, federal officers wrote that she hid from them in her home when they came to deliver the subpoena.
Li said that she had been held in the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Richland County until last Thursday.
In a flurry of filings in the lead up to the trial, prosecutors said they would not introduce any evidence of Ritter’s gang affiliations or criminal history. But prosecutors have also moved to limit any discussion of Doe’s other relationships.
“Such evidence is likely to misdirect the jurors, inflame their passions, and cause jurors to decide the case on the basis of their emotional response to Doe’s conduct or lifestyle, rather than on the basis of the evidence,” prosecutors said in one filing.
For their part, defense attorneys have argued that Doe’s other relationships are central to their case.
“Doe was known for outing other men, threatened to out men and extorted them for money, and was in turn threatened by others,” Ritter’s attorneys wrote. In court Tuesday, away from the jury, Kendrick indicated that he intended to argue that there was evidence of so-called “third party guilt,” meaning someone else could have been responsible for the crime.
The case is scheduled to last ten days.
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Source: Orange County Register
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