The ACLU has successfully fought to have a transgender baby killer be given taxpayer-funded “gender affirming” surgeries. Yesterday, the United States District Court of Indiana ruled that Autumn Cordellioné, born Jonathan C. Richardson, had been subjected to “cruel and unusual punishment” by being denied the various plastic surgeries he had demanded.
Richardson is currently serving a 55-year sentence for the murder of his 11-month-old stepdaughter. As previously reported by Reduxx, Richardson had been left to care for the child while her mother was at work. That night, he was visited by friends who observed he was “acting strangely” and refused to invite them in the house as he normally would.
Despite claiming the little girl was sleeping, Richardson had loud music playing in the home, and his guests noted that he appeared to have a fresh, bleeding tattoo of the child’s name carved into his arm. Shortly after his friends left, Richardson went to a neighbor’s home and asked them to call 911, claiming the child was unresponsive. The baby would later die at the hospital, with the cause of death determined to be asphyxiation by manual strangulation.
Richardson was booked awaiting a court hearing, and would later tell a prison official “all I know is I killed the little fucking bitch.” The following year, he was found guilty and sentenced to 55 years in prison.
In 2020, while incarcerated at the The Correctional Industrial Facility (CIF) in Madison, Richardson began identifying as transgender and taking estradiol, a synthetic estrogen, and anti-androgen spironolactone. Two years later, Richardson lodged a sexual harassment complaint claiming that he had been raped by his cellmate in 2005, and that he stabbed the inmate in retaliation.
Despite the brutal nature of his crime, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Indiana took up his case and launched a human rights lawsuit against the Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC).
In the suit, which was filed in August of 2023, ACLU lawyers refer to Richardson as an “adult transgender female prisoner confined in a male institution,” and complains that “the total ban on gender-affirming surgery violates [his] right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.”
The suit was intended to challenge a recently-adopted policy stipulating that the IDOC cannot provide transgender surgeries to inmates. House Bill 1569, which took effect in July of 2023, bans the spending of state or federal dollars on sexual reassignment surgery for inmates. The bill, the ACLU argues, “mandates deliberate indifference to a serious medical need and therefore violates the Eighth Amendment.”
Among a list of demands prepared by Richardson and presented as evidence in court was a document titled “Surgeries to Reach My Ideal Self.” The first item on the list, the court heard, was a “vagina,” followed by: breast implants, a brow lift, a brow reduction, a tummy tuck, gluteal implants (BBL), a uterus transplant, hair removal, and wigs.
However, during court proceedings Richardson stated that he had amended his demands to two surgeries, an orchiectomy and a penile inversion.
In addition to identifying as transgender, Richardson identifies as “Muslim,” and is currently engaged in a separate lawsuit against his prison’s chaplain for being denied a hijab.
During his deposition, Richardson told the legal counsel for the IDOC, Alex Carlisle, that in 2018, he had been informed about gender identity by another male inmate at CIF who went by the name of “Pearl.” According to Richardson, Pearl had brought in pamphlets from California state prisons that explained the concept of “gender identity” and introduced to him, for the first time, the idea of taking feminizing hormones.
“I always knew I was a girl, didn’t know that term applied. Because until I talked to Pearl I didn’t even really know transgender was the name for it. I was hearing at the time that it was transsexualism and that didn’t seem to fit me because it was apparently people that like to wear girl clothes to have sex,” Richardson said in his deposition.
However, Richardson also stated that while briefly married to the mother of the infant he murdered, he had been working in an “adult bookstore” that sold pornographic videos. While employed as a janitor, Richardson would have sex with various male customers while pretending to be a “girl.”
Richardson further testified that he had taken the feminine name “Autumn” after his high school girlfriend, and said that he used to steal his sister’s clothing and his mother’s makeup as a youth. “When I put on the clothes, I could for a second realize the girl inside,” he said.
“I felt I was only a woman when a man used me,” Richardson remarked. “It was the only acceptable time to be a woman so it brought me a certain amount of satisfaction that I was pleasuring a man like a woman would and I got to express who I was.”
But the mother of the baby girl Richardson strangled to death opposed his legal bid to obtain surgery. Linda Thomas submitted a brief statement expressing her concern that his identity may be concealed from her when he is released from prison.
“On the day he murdered my child, I personally observed Plaintiff with a fresh bleeding tattoo of my child’s name on his arm while I was at the hospital that evening,” Thomas said. “I live in fear for myself and my children of the day [Richardson] is released from prison, which largely increases at the thought that [his] identity may be concealed upon release.”
ACLU attorneys under the leadership of Kenneth Falk attempted to have Thomas’ testimony dismissed as court evidence on the basis that “Ms. Cordellioné objected to the relevance of this declaration.”
During court proceedings, Kate Meltzer, a legal representative for the Office of the Attorney General, emphasized an issue of “timeliness” related to Richardson’s attempts to secure an early release.
On January 4th, Richardson had lodged a pro se request seeking a reduction of his sentence. According to Meltzer, Richardson’s request claimed that the “circumstances that resulted in the crime are no longer present,” as the motivation for the murder of the young girl was “tied to [his] transgender identity and [his] gender dysphoria.”
The court also heard testimony from Stephen B. Levine, a psychiatrist who specializes in sexual dysfunction and transsexualism, who founded the Case Western Reserve Gender Identity Clinic in Cleveland during the 1970’s. Levine was Chair of the fifth edition of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) Standards of Care in 1998. He also served on the American Psychiatric Association DSM-IV Subcommittee on Gender Identity Disorders.
In March of this year, while the case was ongoing, Levine emailed the Attorney General’s counsel Alexander Carlisle pleading with him to empathize with Richardson. According to Dr. Levine, Richardson’s condition “is a product of the need to find coherence, consistency, and stability”. The “countless traumas” experienced by Richardson, the gender clinician said, “began with her birth (actually with her pregnancy)”, indicating his belief that a transgender identity develops in utero.
As noted in court documents, in recent years Dr. Levine derived between 40% to 50% of his income from serving as an expert witness in litigation regarding the treatment of patients with “gender dysphoria”.
The ruling issued by Judge Richard Young on September 17 has far-reaching implications and sets a precedent for further surgeries and hormones to be doled out at taxpayers’ expense. The verdict declares that the statute added to Indiana’s legal code in 2023 barring the DOC from facilitating “medically necessary gender-affirming” surgeries for inmates qualifies as “sex discrimination.”
In a statement on Richardson’s legal win, ACLU of Indiana Legal Director Kenneth Falk said: “Today marks a significant victory for transgender individuals in Indiana’s prisons. Denying evidence-based medical care to incarcerated people simply because they are transgender is unconstitutional. We are pleased that the Court agreed.”
The ACLU has pursued multiple lawsuits in several states against the US prison authorities on behalf of men convicted of horrific crimes. As revealed by Reduxx, a 2019 ACLU lawsuit against the New Jersey Department of Corrections which required the state to allow violent male inmates to self-identify into the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women was lodged on behalf of a self-admitted diaper fetishist and convicted terrorist.
Last year, the ACLU of Florida criticized officials for not providing “gender-affirming care” to a convicted rapist and murderer prior to his execution. Duane Owen had been handed a death sentence after brutally murdering a 38-year-old mother and a 14-year-old girl in 1984. Owen claimed that he sexually assaulted women as part of a ritual to harvest their hormones, and that he was a transsexual who carried out the sexual violence to “turn himself into a female.”
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