365Gay.com – by The Associated Press
Baltimore, Maryland – A transgendered inmate freed from prison last year because she was dying of AIDS has been charged with using a forged Maryland death certificate to get new criminal charges dismissed.
Dee Deirdre Farmer, 41, was charged yesterday with forging a Baltimore Circuit Court order to change the death certificate of a man named Charles Smith to reflect that Farmer was the person who had died. Charging documents showed that Farmer got criminal charges in Virginia dismissed using a forged Maryland death certificate.
In a landmark case, Farmer sued federal prison officials over a 1989 rape that occurred about a week after Farmer entered a federal maximum-security prison for men in Terre Haute, Ind. Farmer had arrived with male sex organs and breast implants, after undergoing estrogen therapy.
The lawsuit claimed the government had violated Farmer’s constitutional right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment by ignoring the risk that a feminine-appearing inmate would be raped by other prisoners. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1994 that prison officials can sometimes be held liable for inmate assaults revived Farmer’s lawsuit, which had been dismissed by lower courts. After the Supreme Court decision, however, she lost the case at trial.