The trial of a Black teenager charged in the 2023 murder of a Black transgender woman in Highland Park was cut short on Tuesday after the defendant fell asleep during testimony.
Carlos Scotland, 18, spoke with his attorney ahead of testimony in the first day of his trial but it wasn’t long before he zonked out, CBS News reports. Scotland is charged with the shooting death of 34-year-old Ashia Davis at a Woodward Inn during the first day of Pride Month last year.
Michigan State Police Detective Sgt. James Plummer was testifying about inconsistencies while interrogating Scotland, who was 17 at the time of the murder, when the defendant dozed off.
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Plummer testified that Scotland initially claimed Davis attacked him with a knife, before changing his story.
“He initially said he had took the knife and discarded it in a field,” Plummer said. “He then recanted that and said that the victim swung at him with a closed fist while possessing a phone in the victim’s left hand.
“He provided great detail, initially looking at a map as to where he discarded this knife before saying there was no knife.”
Chief Judge Brigette Officer Holley eventually adjourned Tuesday’s hearing when Scotland could not stay awake. His attorney, told Holley another inmate drugged him with three pills before court, according to CBS News.
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The hearing is expected to resume on Thursday.
Highland Park Police responded to the Woodward Inn just after 11 p.m. on June 1, 2023 following reports of a shooting and found Davis dead in the room with a single gunshot wound to the head, the Detroit Free Press reports.
“Timestamps on the hotel’s security video from the night of the murder show a teen or young man believed to be Scotland walking across the hotel’s interior courtyard parking lot at 10:57 p.m. and then entering Davis’s room a minute later,” according to the Advocate. “The same person can be seen running from the room at 11:16 p.m., according to the video’s timestamp.”
Scotland was eventually charged with first-degree murder, felony firearm, carrying a concealed weapon, and resisting and obstructing a police officer in March 2024 following a Michigan State Police investigation.
Numerous news sites noted Davis was one of 32 transgender or “gender expansive” folks who were killed in violent crimes in the US last year, with half of those victims Black transgender women.
That data comes from the Human Rights Campaign, which has documented fatal transgender violence since 2013.
The murders of Black transgender women in particular has become a hot political issue for Democrats who have attempted to insinuate an “epidemic” of violence against them is rooted in bigotry and racism.
President Joe Biden leveraged that narrative during his 2020 campaign against then incumbent President Donald Trump, alleging the “the fastest way to end it is, end the Trump administration,” according to CNN.
Others including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have directly attributed the killings to “white supremacy.”
The facts, however, paint another picture.
An extensive review of cases publicized by the HRC in the four years leading up to Davis’ death found out of 100 cases highlighted, 60 suspects identified were black, two were white, and one was Latino.
In other words, black suspects accounted for 95 percent of black trans murders.
Additionally, 2021 – Joe Biden’s first year in the presidency – had the most cases, 36, despite his assertion that defeating the Trump administration would end trans murders. There were 22 in 2022, 21 in 2020 and 20 in 2019, according to the HRC listings.
Of the 16 black trans women killed last year, suspects have been identified in nine cases and all but one are black men. One of the cases, a double murder, also involved a nonconforming black man, who was also killed by a black man, police allege.
The one identified suspect who was not black appeared to be Hispanic.