Whigham had recently completed her nursing licensure, and since January worked as a registered nurse at Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg, Miss. She was reportedly sharing the hotel room where she was killed with friends who were also planning to attend the rodeo. Originally from Shubuta, a small town in central Mississippi, Whigham had traveled to the Biloxi area with friends to attend the Gulf Coast Black Rodeo at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum. But if investigators discover that Hickerson did kill Whigham in part because of her gender identity, Hickerson could be charged under the federal hate-crime statute passed in 2009 and signed into law by President Obama. Mississippi's hate-crime statute does not currently cover gender identity, and only 17 states have enacted such measures to date. Police officials have thus far declined to comment on the possibility that Whigham's murder was a hate crime or motivated by her gender identity. Charges were filed against Hickerson after police officers searched his residence at the nearby Keesler Air Force Base. Navy recruit originally from New Orleans, who was stationed in the area for training. This article was amended on to clarify that Joshua Vallum was not the first American to be prosecuted for a transgender hate crime – although he was the first to be successfully prosecuted for a transgender hate crime under the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a federal law that was introduced by Barack Obama in 2009.The local paper reports that Hickerson is a U.S.Last week, a Virginia state court angered LGBT activists by ruling that attacks motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation could not be prosecuted as hate crime under the state’s law. Vallum had previously been sentenced to life in prison in a state court for the same murder.īut federal prosecutors brought an additional lawsuit for hate crime because Mississippi lacks a statute protecting people against hate crimes based on their gender identity, the Department of Justice said.Īccording to a 2015 NCTE survey, nearly one in 10 US trans people said they had been physically attacked because of being transgender in the year prior to completing the survey. “Today’s sentencing reflects the importance of holding individuals accountable when they commit violent acts against transgender individuals,” said attorney general Jeff Sessions in a statement. This was the first case where a victim had been targeted because of gender identity that had been prosecuted under the US federal hate crime law, the Department of Justice said in a statement. He struck deadly blows to Williamson’s head with a hammer after she tried running away, prosecutors said. He decided to kill Williamson, fearing that he could face retribution from other gang members if word spread she was a transgender woman, prosecutors said.Īfter luring his former lover to his father’s home in Mississippi, Vallum shocked Williamson with a stun gun before stabbing her repeatedly with a pocket knife. Vallum, a member of the Latin Kings street gang, believed to the largest Hispanic gang in the United States, secretly dated Williamson during the summer of 2014, according to prosecutors. In 2009, Congress expanded a federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s sexual orientation among other factors. “It’s essential that biased crime against trans people be recognized as a serious national problem,” she said in a phone interview. Harper Jean Tobin, spokeswoman for the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), a Washington DC advocacy group, said the murder was part of an “epidemic of violence against transgender people” in the United States. The 29-year-old man appeared in Gulfport, Mississippi before a federal judge who could have imposed a maximum sentence of life without parole.
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