17 June 201721 December 2022 4WardEverUK

Can Ramarley Graham’s family get justice for his death?

source: NYMag.com
published: 14 June 2017

At the close of the last century, the New York City Police Department switched from full-metal-jacket bullets to hollow points. It was a move meant to spare lives — in theory, anyway.

The old bullets had a tendency to pass through their targets and endanger bystanders, while hollow points expand after impact, inflicting greater damage to internal organs but also increasing the likelihood that the bullet will slow to a halt inside the body.

And so, on February 2, 2012, when Officer Richard Haste shot 18-year-old Ramarley Graham — who was unarmed, standing in his own bathroom — the hollow-point bullet did just that.

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31 May 201721 December 2022 4WardEverUK

Transgender prisoner Vikki Thompson did not mean to kill herself

source: The Guardian
published: 19 May 2017

A transgender woman found dead in a male prison did not mean to kill herself and should not have been held in a female jail, a jury has concluded.

Vikki Thompson, a vulnerable 21-year-old who had grown up in and out of care in Keighley, West Yorkshire, was found hanged in her cell in the dark at HMP Leeds on 13 November 2015 after warning several people on her way to jail that she would “leave in a box”, Wakefield coroner’s court heard.

5 May 201721 December 2022 4WardEverUK

Transgender woman said she would leave male prison ‘in a box’

source: The Guardian
published: 2 May 2017

A transgender woman sent to a male prison was found dead in her cell after repeatedly warning that she would leave “in a box”, a jury has heard.

Vikki Thompson, 21, had been living as a female since she was 10. She died within a month of arriving at HMP Leeds in October 2015. She had changed her name when she was 17, but had never applied for a gender recognition certificate and had not had any gender reassignment surgery, the coroner Jonathan Leach told Wakefield coroner’s court on Tuesday.