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A federal judge has invoked the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishments” in ruling that the Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC) must pay for a convicted baby murderer, a biological male, to have gender transition surgeries. If there is anyone who will be suffering “cruel and unusual punishments” in this case, it will be the taxpayers of Indiana who must bear the costs of these surgeries unless the decision is overturned on appeal.
Unfortunately, the Indiana federal court ruling is part of a disturbing trend by some courts to turn the Eighth Amendment on its head to accommodate demands by self-identified transgender inmates – even the most violent ones. In this case, a biological male, Jonathan Richardson, who murdered his defenseless baby stepdaughter while living with his female spouse is claiming to be a female himself and entitled to have gender transition surgeries at taxpayers’ expense.
Nearly twenty years after being incarcerated with other males in a male prison, this convict decided to begin self-identifying as transgender, calling himself Autumn Cordellioné. With the ACLU’s help, “Autumn Cordellioné” (née Jonathan Richardson) filed a complaint in federal court challenging the constitutionality of an Indiana statute banning gender-affirming surgery for transgender inmates. The Indiana Department of Corrections had complied with the statute’s ban in this case.
The complaint demanded that the Indiana Department of Corrections pay for this transgender inmate to have specified genital gender transition surgeries. It did not matter that the IDOC had already provided less drastic treatments such as taxpayer funded hormone therapy and mental health care. The convicted murderer was not satisfied and demanded that Indiana taxpayers must foot the bill for this inmate to receive more radical and expensive surgical treatments.
On Sept. 17, Federal District Court Judge Richard L. Young of the Southern District of Indiana granted the relief that the convicted baby murderer requested. The judge used “Autumn Cordellioné” and female pronouns to refer to the self-identified transgender inmate throughout his opinion. This column, however, will use the biological male’s original name, Jonathan Richardson, and male pronouns.
Judge Young concluded that genital gender transition surgery was “medically necessary” in Richardson’s case as the only effective treatment for Richardson’s psychiatric condition known as gender dysphoria. He declared Indiana’s statute banning such surgeries for inmates as unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishments” clause.
Judge Young cited in support of his decision a federal appeals court’s holding that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments imposes a constitutional duty on the states “to provide adequate medical care to incarcerated individuals.” Judge Young applied this ruling to genital gender transition surgeries because, in the judge’s words, “Ms. Cordellioné cannot stand the testicles and penis on her body.” He cited several judicial decisions, including by the ultra-liberal Ninth Circuit, requiring that prison authorities provide gender-affirming surgery that is deemed “medically necessary” for an inmate requesting such surgery.
In concluding that the genital gender transitional surgeries that Mr. Richardson (aka Autumn Cordellioné) is seeking to be “medically necessary,” Judge Young cherry-picked the expert opinions that supported his predilection.
The judge brushed aside the opinion of an expert presented by the defendant, the Indiana Department of Corrections. He is a psychiatrist who has been licensed for more than fifty years with expertise in treating transgender patients since he completed his residency. This expert raised legitimate concerns about surgical complications as well as whether each inmate requesting gender transition surgery is psychologically suitable for the surgery and capable of giving informed consent. Judge Young basically ignored these legitimate concerns.
Yet Judge Young accepted as gospel the testimony of the two experts, a psychologist and a surgeon, presented by the convicted baby murderer plaintiff, which supported the judge’s conclusion that genital gender transition surgery is “medically necessary.” The psychologist opined that the Indiana Department of Corrections was not providing sufficient treatment. The psychologist determined that the treatment Richardson had received to date failed to address (as paraphrased by Judge Young) “Ms. Cordellioné’s experience that her genitals are ‘wrong’ and her inability to resolve her agony about having male genitalia.” The judge added, “Surgery would attenuate the depression, anxiety, and hopelessness that Ms. Cordellioné experiences with her gender dysphoria.”
Judge Young’s opinion mentions only in passing why Richardson was imprisoned in the first place, well before he renamed himself Autumn Cordellioné and self-identified as a transgender. “She is in prison for murdering her infant stepdaughter,” Judge Young wrote as if at the time it was a woman who killed “her” female spouse’s baby girl. (Emphasis added) The rest of Judge Young’s opinion treats the convicted murderer as the victim of an insensitive prison system. He ignored the real victims – the baby girl whom Richardson killed, and the actual woman Richardson had married who lost her baby.
Judge Young conceded that “the treatment IDOC has provided—hormone therapy, psychotherapy, and social transitioning—has afforded Ms. Cordellioné some relief.” But such relief, he wrote, “has ‘stopped short’ of what is necessary to alleviate her pain and urges to commit self-harm.” The reason for the convicted baby killer’s pain, Judge Young explained, is that “Ms. Cordellioné cannot stand the testicles and penis on her body.”
In other words, Indiana’s taxpayers are being forced to pay to “alleviate” the “distress” that “Ms. Cordellioné” is experiencing “due to her genitals.”
This is sheer insanity. Yet, believe it or not, Judge Young is not alone among federal judges who have applied the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments to a corrections department’s denial of an inmate’s request for gender transition surgery. It made no difference to these judges that the inmates requesting the surgeries had already received hormone therapy, psychotherapy, and social transitioning at taxpayers’ expense. This just goes to show how woke activist judges make bad law from the bench. It should also be noted that Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ nominee for president, has supported public funding of both inmates’ and detained illegal immigrants’ sex change operations.
A law-abiding transgender does not have a constitutional right in the U.S. to receive taxpayer funded gender transition surgery. This is the case even if the doctor taking care of the individual determines that such surgery is “medically necessary” to treat the transgender’s gender dysphobia. Yet woke judges such as Judge Young have created a constitutional right especially for convicted murderers and other inmates to receive taxpayer funded transgender transition surgeries because not to do so would somehow amount to “cruel and unusual” punishment.
This means that a taxpayer who obeys the law, stays out of jail, and has the same gender dysphobia condition as an inmate must fund the inmate’s surgery but does not have a constitutional right to equal treatment.
The constitutional interpretation of “cruel and unusual punishments” has evolved over the years to correspond with what the Supreme Court has described as “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Thus, a punishment that is grossly disproportionate to the crime committed, such as imposing an extremely long sentence for a minor theft, is considered a “cruel and unusual” punishment. Executing a juvenile under the age of eighteen is also considered to be a “cruel and unusual” punishment. So is unnecessary and malicious infliction of pain and suffering upon a prisoner, or a prison guard’s deliberate indifference to a prisoner’s serious illness or injury.
However, branding the refusal to expend scarce public resources on genital gender transition surgeries for inmates dissatisfied with their genitalia as a “cruel and unusual” punishment is a mark of a society that is losing its way.