When Ricki Mahkimetas first hit Grace Pinson's nose, she felt it crunch. Pinson is transgender, a woman with breasts and long curly hair in a prison full of men. Over the 17 years she’s spent in federal prison, she’s brought more than 100 lawsuits against the Bureau of Prisons and its staff for failing, again and again, to keep her safe. This beating by her cellmate, who is serving more than 16 years for sexual assault, became the basis of another lawsuit, The Marshall Project reports. Pinson argued that prison officers should have known she was at high risk for sexual assault as a transgender woman, yet they placed her in a cell without a working alarm with a convicted sex offender. Pinson said that during the attack Mahkimetas tried to yank off her pants. Whenever she reached down to hold up her waistband he would punch her in the face. He denied this to prison investigators, saying there was nothing sexual about the assault.
Pinson v. the United States of America convened in November 2023. The trial in Pinson’s lawsuit offered a window into how difficult it can be to hold prison officials accountable, and in doing so, raised other questions related to the danger of being a trans woman in prison? Pinson represented herself, arguing that staff failed to protect her under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Passed by Congress in 2003, the law’s stated purpose was to “establish a zero-tolerance standard for the incidence of prison rape” in the United States. But more than 1,300 trans women are locked in federal prisons alongside men. Not only are they at risk for extortion and assault, they are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. Federal District Judge Rosemary Márquez did not find that the government was negligent by placing Pinson in the cell with Mahkimetas. But the judge did find the government had violated its own guidelines by not having a functional duress alarm in the cell, and that if Pinson had had access to the alarm, she would have had officers there to help her within one minute. Because it took about five minutes for staff to respond, Pinson was beaten unnecessarily for approximately four minutes, the judge wrote in her decision. With an alarm, Pinson would have still been beaten, but her injuries would have been less severe. She was awarded $10,000 in damages. Pinson has filed an appeal to make a broader point about the prison system’s failures. "The thing that has driven me crazy in this case, start to finish,” she said, “is that the bureau was never willing to acknowledge, not even at the trial, that it could have done things differently to keep me safe.”