Recognizing Student Scholarship

By, Maria Iacobo

With final exams approaching and graduation just beyond them, Jane Tanimura ’12 has a lot going on. 

But the Los Angeles native happily took time off recently at the request of UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute; Tanimura was selected to present her paper at their Contemporary LGBTQ Scholarship Student Workshop held in conjunction with their 11th Annual Update Conference.

Tanimura researched cases involving transgender prisoners and found a recent decision whereby a female transgender inmate was successful in pursuing a damages claim against prison officials. Currently, the more common way for prisoners to sue prison officials is through an 8th Amendment challenge (cruel and unusual punishment action).

Her paper, “A Duty to Protect Female Transgender Inmates From the Obvious and Foreseeable Risk of Sexual Assault,” argues that female transgender inmates who have been abused are more likely to succeed in a lawsuit against prison officials under a “negligent duty to protect analysis.”

Jane Tanimura '12

“The 8th Amendment challenge is much more difficult [than a damages claim] because it’s governed by a ‘deliberate indifference’ standard,” Tanimura said. “Under this, you have to reach into the mindset of the prison officials and in effect prove what the prison officials were actually thinking at that time and that they perhaps knew that the transgender inmate was being raped and assaulted, but consciously disregarded it.  That’s a hard standard to meet.”

In the case of Giraldo v. California Dept. of Corrections (2008), a female transgender California state prison inmate, who claimed to have suffered repeated sexual assaults and beatings at the hands of two cellmates, was allowed to pursue a negligence damage claim against prison officials. The California First District Court of Appeals ruled that although numerous courts in other states had ruled that a jailer has a duty under tort law to protect vulnerable prisoners from attack, there was no previous binding California precedent, which caused the trial court to dismiss the negligence claim.

“I argue that this duty of care analysis is an easier standard to meet – especially when you apply it to a female transgender inmate,” Tanimura said. “It’s so foreseeable and obvious that she’s going to be at risk for sexual assault. It’s also clear that prison officials have a duty to take preventative measures.”

“Ms. Tanimura's paper is timely, informed, and refreshingly practical,” said Prof. Michael Boucai, the Institute’s Sears Law Teaching Fellow and the workshop’s facilitator. “Her suggestion that tort law might succeed in protecting transgender prisoners where constitutional law consistently fails is one that deserves a wide audience. I hope she chooses to publish the piece.”

Tanimura had originally written the paper for a Sex, Gender and the Law class taught by Prof. David Cruz. Interested in pursuing a career in criminal defense, Tanimura has had two externships with the federal public defender’s office: the trial unit and the capital habeas unit. She has also worked in the Post-Conviction Justice Project, a USC Law clinical program in which students represent parole-eligible inmates serving indeterminate life sentences for murder in California.

“Those experiences have allowed me to meet prisoners and get a sense of what prison conditions are like,” Tanimura said. “I took Prof. Cruz’s class because he is such a great professor and I wanted to know more about LGBTQ issues.”

Tanimura, a 2007 graduate of Brown University, will spend the summer studying for the California Bar Exam.