Every jailhouse lawyer is aware of Dee Farmer’s identify, even when they don’t know who she is.
Farmer v. Brennan is among the many most often cited Supreme Court docket circumstances of all time, referred to in tens of 1000’s of lawsuits: about insufficient medical care, moldy and contaminated meals, overcrowding, understaffing, gang violence, and a variety of different points in prisons and jails. Anybody suing the federal government to say that corrections officers violated the Structure by being detached to their well being or security has Farmer to thank.
What most of them don’t know is that the one who paved the street for them was a transgender lady who filed her swimsuit from a federal jail cell, in an period when her gender id was thought of a psychological sickness.
The unique handwritten criticism that Dee Farmer filed from federal jail in 1991. This was the origin of the case Farmer v. Brennan. The case was finally heard by the Supreme Court docket in 1994.
Because the Trump administration takes purpose at transgender individuals, and state legislatures cross lots of of anti-trans legal guidelines, jail techniques face a flood of lawsuits demanding that they supply gender-affirming care. Farmer was bringing fits like these almost 40 years in the past.
In Farmer v. Brennan, the excessive courtroom for the primary time stated that individuals in prisons and jails have a constitutional proper to be protected against violence and assault by different prisoners. The 1994 determination discovered that failure to guard the security of individuals in custody will be thought of merciless and strange punishment.
Farmer was the primary transgender plaintiff identified to have a case heard by the Supreme Court docket, and her lawsuit was the primary time that the courtroom addressed the difficulty of sexual assault in jail. And it laid the groundwork for the landmark Jail Rape Elimination Act in 2003.
“When she was bringing these claims, she by no means thought she would win,” stated D Dangaran, a jail civil rights legal professional and good friend of Farmer’s. “She simply thought she had a proper to ask for it.”
Even as a younger youngster rising up in Baltimore, Farmer adopted “female pursuits and mannerisms,” as she wrote in courtroom paperwork later, “and a dislike for male oriented actions.” Lecturers usually took a particular curiosity in her, she stated, first for her intelligence, after which after they noticed the ruthlessness with which different youngsters focused her. Unable to handle the stress of being bullied, she finally dropped out.
At 14, Farmer began shopping for feminine hormones on the black market. By 19, she had modified her first identify, had breast augmentation surgical procedure and enrolled in a program to arrange for added gender-affirming surgical procedure, working with a number of medical doctors in Baltimore. She was additionally working a hustle with a number of buddies to make use of stolen bank card numbers to purchase furnishings, computer systems and video tools, and have them delivered to buddies’ homes.
In 1985, she was arrested and charged in state and federal courts with separate crimes associated to the scheme: theft, housebreaking and passing dangerous checks in state courtroom; bank card fraud in federal courtroom. She pleaded responsible, pondering the decide would order her varied sentences to run on the similar time. He didn’t. At 21, Farmer was sentenced to twenty years in federal jail, to be adopted by 30 years in Maryland state jail.
She was despatched to a males’s jail, the place, as a result of her youth and femininity made her weak, she spent nearly all of her first few years in solitary confinement. One official instructed her that basically inhabitants, “I’d be raped at knife level or probably murdered, as a result of I’d be the closest factor the inmates may get to a lady,” she wrote in a courtroom submitting. When she did spend time basically inhabitants in one other facility, “I used to be continuously approached by inmates for intercourse,” she wrote, and on multiple event felt she couldn’t say no.
As a toddler who was picked on and ostracized, Farmer had lengthy sought refuge in quiet locations the place she might be alone and browse. “After I obtained to jail, the regulation library was the place the place most individuals didn’t go. That’s how I started to go there. And naturally, the extra I learn, the extra aware I grew to become in regards to the regulation and what was proper and incorrect,” she recalled in an interview with The Marshall Venture. She filed her first lawsuit inside a yr, and shortly, different prisoners sought her out for assist with their authorized filings. “The extra I litigated, the higher I grew to become,” Farmer recalled.
On the time she was locked up, federal prisons wouldn’t permit gender-affirming medicines. She began getting in bother for smuggling feminine hormones into the power. As soon as, she submitted a solid courtroom doc to her jail medical doctors, ordering them to prescribe her estrogen. Jail officers additionally wrote her up for ordering girls’s garments, jewellery, hair relaxer, and even flowers from the surface, and for carrying her jail uniform off one shoulder. All these infractions — and, Farmer contends, in retaliation for her more and more efficient authorized advocacy — led officers to switch her from a medium-security jail in Wisconsin to the maximum-security penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The jail in Terre Haute was a very harmful place, with rampant use of medication and alcohol and a big inhabitants of individuals serving lengthy phrases for violent crimes, Farmer wrote later in courtroom paperwork. There, officers despatched her into basic inhabitants.
The outcome, she argued, was completely predictable. Lower than two weeks after her arrival in 1989, one other prisoner entered her cell and sexually assaulted her, she recounted in her authorized filings. He punched her, tore her garments and pinned her down. She tried to battle again, however when she noticed a home made knife, she stated, she relented, petrified of being stabbed. By the point he left, her face was swollen, her lips and nostril have been busted, and he or she was bloodied and humiliated.
Getting justice after a sexual assault is troublesome beneath any circumstances, however significantly so in jail, the place a lawsuit is commonly the one recourse. So, she sued. Farmer needed the warden and a slew of Bureau of Prisons officers to pay her damages for her struggling. However first, she needed to show that they have been responsible for violating her rights.
The handwritten amended criticism from federal jail in 1991 by Dee Farmer. Filed a number of months after the unique criticism, it incorporates extra particulars and a extra fleshed-out authorized argument.
Writing with a felt-tipped pen on lined paper, Farmer argued that jail officers knew that “the plaintiff or any male-to-female preoperative transsexual, who has a female look…can be sexually assaulted at USP-Terre Haute.” The warden knew she was trans. He knew that her youth and female look would make her a goal, she argued. And he housed her basically inhabitants anyway.
For his or her half, jail officers argued in a quick that Farmer had by no means warned them that she can be attacked. They stated they have been “not liable beneath the Eighth Modification until they know that an inmate is in imminent hazard of assault and determine to do nothing.”
At the moment, in 1991, this was not settled regulation. The Supreme Court docket had dominated years earlier that jail officers violated prisoners’ rights in the event that they confirmed “deliberate indifference…to a prisoner’s critical sickness or harm,” however had by no means clarified what “deliberate indifference” meant in different contexts or easy methods to show it.
Robert Loeb was an legal professional on the Division of Justice on the time of Farmer’s lawsuit, and he helped draft a few of the authorities’s briefs within the case. In a current interview with the Marshall Venture, he identified that the division’s Civil Rights Division tried to carry state and native officers accountable when their prisons and jails weren’t run humanely — so he and his colleagues weren’t unsympathetic to Farmer’s plight. On the similar time, “prisons will be harmful locations. Each time one prisoner assaults one other, you’ll be able to’t have jail guards, the director of the Bureau of Prisons and the director of the area being sued.”
As for Farmer, she argued that as a result of jail officers management nearly each facet of the lives of these incarcerated of their establishments — the place they stay, what they eat, what they put on, who they stay with — jail workers must be held to a better commonplace than different authorities officers.
“It appeared quite common sense to me,” Farmer stated lately. “Can you place anyone in a spot the place you realize they’re going to be harmed? They haven’t any management over the place they go. It’s completely as much as you.”
That argument didn’t go nicely within the federal district courtroom in Wisconsin, the place she misplaced. When she appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court docket of Appeals, she misplaced once more, so she appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court docket.
It was an audacious present of confidence for somebody who had by no means accomplished highschool, and there was no purpose to assume her case would catch the justices’ consideration.
In her petition to the Supreme Court docket, which she typed up in her jail’s regulation library, Farmer argued that it was incorrect to say that jail officers needed to learn about, and ignore, a selected menace with a view to be held accountable. She didn’t know a selected individual would assault her on a given day. Fairly, her threat basically inhabitants was so apparent that officers ought to have identified and brought precautions to guard her.
The Supreme Court docket receives 1000’s of petitions yearly and solely hears about 80. However Farmer obtained a way that the justices have been significantly contemplating the case when she obtained a replica of a letter the Supreme Court docket despatched to a decrease courtroom, asking for the complete report. So, she wrote to the ACLU in Washington, D.C., and requested whether or not, if the Supreme Court docket accepted her case, it might symbolize her. The ACLU stated sure.
From the vantage level of at this time, it’s onerous to think of simply what Farmer was up towards. On the time, it was authorized to be fired for being homosexual, and it might be for years. Trans individuals have been the butt of jokes in big-budget Hollywood slapstick comedies. At a 1991 trial in a case she’d introduced demanding entry to feminine hormones, a decide instructed Farmer to face nonetheless as a result of he didn’t need her “sashaying round my courtroom,” as she recalled. (She misplaced.)
Behind the scenes on the Supreme Court docket, a younger clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun named Sherry Colb efficiently urged her boss to take the case. Colb, who went on to grow to be a preeminent authorized scholar, wrote in a memo, “Rape will not be a punishment that jail officers can expose or topic a prisoner to for violating jail guidelines.” Just a few months later, within the fall of 1993, the courtroom introduced it might hear Farmer’s case.
Margo Schlanger was additionally a regulation clerk on the Supreme Court docket that time period, working for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “In contrast to most state actors, who’ve solely destructive obligations — all they need to do will not be damage you — in jail, it’s completely different. They really have affirmative obligations to run prisons humanely,” stated Schlanger, now a College of Michigan regulation professor, summarizing Farmer’s argument. In different contexts, the place a public official could also be obtuse or silly for lacking one thing apparent, “not realizing one thing inside jail is dereliction of obligation,” Schlanger stated. That principle, which Farmer specified by her petition to the courtroom — “it’s good.”
The day that her case was argued earlier than the Supreme Court docket, in January 1994, was like another day for Farmer. She spent it in solitary confinement within the federal jail in Florence, Colorado, the place she had been transferred after the assault in Terre Haute. She wasn’t allowed to attend oral arguments on the courtroom in Washington, D.C., however the ACLU spoke for her.
An Related Press wire story protecting Dee Farmer’s 1994 Supreme Court docket case appeared in nationwide newspapers.
Elizabeth Alexander, the ACLU legal professional, referred to as her “she.”
Paul Bender, the federal government’s legal professional, referred to as her “he.”
For his or her half, the justices appeared to attempt to keep away from utilizing any pronouns in any respect. It’s onerous to think about now, however the effort to not misgender Farmer was an enormous deal on the time, Schlanger stated. Ginsburg often referred to as her “she” however extra usually, along with her heavy Brooklyn accent, simply referred to as her “Farmer.”
The justices primarily tangled with the query of what jail officers needed to know with a view to be responsible for “deliberate indifference.”
In early drafts of the justices’ opinions, which have been made public in 2004 after the demise of Justice Harry Blackmun and the discharge of his papers, the justices staked out many positions. Justice David Souter experimented with the phrase “willful blindness”: What if jail officers didn’t know one thing as a result of they did not need to know? Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia argued that inhumane and harmful therapy in jail wasn’t merciless and strange punishment.
In the long run, in a unanimous determination handed down in June 1994, the 9 justices “type of went down the center,” Farmer stated in a current interview. To be responsible for “deliberate indifference,” officers had to pay attention to a threat of significant hurt and disrespect it. This strict interpretation received over the extra conservative justices. However the justices who needed to facet with Farmer additionally claimed a victory. They set a comparatively low bar for a prisoner to show the official was conscious: “a factfinder could conclude {that a} jail official knew of a considerable threat from the actual fact that the chance was apparent.”
After which they despatched Farmer’s case again right down to the decrease courts to weigh whether or not, with this new commonplace as a information, the Bureau of Prisons officers had been intentionally detached to the chance that she can be raped when she was positioned basically inhabitants on the penitentiary in Terre Haute.
So, in 1997 — eight years after her rape — Farmer was capable of confront jail officers for placing her in hurt’s method, in a trial within the district courtroom. “By that point, the Bureau of Prisons claimed that every one the information of the surroundings of Terre Haute — administrative detention and disciplinary information for the interval that I used to be there — had been destroyed,” Farmer stated.
After simply two days at trial, she misplaced. The jury didn’t imagine her testimony that she had been raped. Whereas Farmer v. Brennan led to a path for prisoners to hunt redress for abuses they endure in prisons, it didn’t, in the end, profit Farmer herself.
By the time she was launched in 2020, Farmer had served greater than 30 years in federal and state prisons, and he or she was legally blind from a congenital eye situation. (If different prisoners needed her assist with authorized filings, she stated, she requested for them to learn case regulation aloud as cost.) She had AIDS, and all of the out there antiretroviral medicines had failed. Medical doctors gave her a yr to stay, she stated. A Maryland decide in the end lowered the state portion of her sentence to time served so she may enroll in a scientific trial of some new HIV medicines, which saved her life.
Dee Farmer outdoors her residence in Baltimore, Maryland.
Now 60 and residing in Baltimore as soon as once more, Farmer is soft-spoken and unassuming. She channels what would possibly in any other case manifest as anger into Fight4Justice, the nonprofit group she based to proceed serving to incarcerated individuals analysis and write authorized claims and join with attorneys. She is the topic of a forthcoming podcast about her life and work, and lately co-authored a regulation overview article about Farmer v. Brennan along with her good friend Dangaran.
She stated the present political ambiance, by which lawmakers are concentrating on transgender individuals’s rights, feels completely different from what she confronted greater than 30 years in the past.
“Previously, it was extra out of ignorance or lack of schooling,” she stated. “Individuals weren’t out to deliberately make you endure.” Now, she stated, “it feels very deliberate and intentional.”
