Unmentioned in the ACLU’s lawsuit demanding that taxpayers foot the bill for a prison inmate’s gender transition surgery is that its plaintiff — a man named Jonathan Richardson who now goes by Autumn Cordellioné — is behind bars for murdering an 11-month-old baby.
On Monday, the ACLU’s Indiana branch filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana on behalf of Richardson, demanding he be allowed to get transgender genital surgery while imprisoned. The lawsuit gives almost no biographical information about Richardson, aside from that he is an “adult transgender female prisoner confined in a male institution within the Indiana Department of Correction.”
The 41-year-old Richardson was convicted of murdering his 11-month-old stepdaughter in Evansville, Indiana, in 2001, according to Indiana Department of Correction records.
The baby’s autopsy showed she had been manually strangled to death while her mother was at work, according to court documents from Richardson’s appeal. He told detectives that he also shook the child “in a rough manner,” the appeal documents said.
