Buying Time
Sentencing postponed in transgender murder case
It’s been two months since Preston Randolph Logan pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, but it will be at least one more week before he receives his sentence.
Logan, 43, killed his girlfriend, Grafton Lee Person, a 42-year-old transgender woman who was known in the community as Diamond on Jan. 3. While he was scheduled to be sentenced on April 12, defense attorney Heather Pinckney requested it be rescheduled for April 20.
”[She] filed a motion for continuance because they had a psychological evaluation done of the defendant, they just received the psychological report today, therefore they needed an additional week to review it, go over it with the defendant and address that when we come to court next Friday,” said assistant U.S. attorney June Jeffries, prosecutor in this case.
In court, Pinckney told Judge Wendell P. Gardner Jr. that she had asked for a psychological evaluation by a particular date, and that it had become unavailable when the psychologist who had conducted the evaluation, went to Alaska for ”an emergency.”
Earline Budd, a friend of Person’s and drop-in center coordinator at Transgender Health Empowerment, suspects that the defense attorney is ”buying more time.”
”To me it’s all crazy,” she says.
”They’re building a case for some sort of psychological breakdown… or something that would attribute to why [Logan] did what he did as far as committing this murder. It does not make sense. It’s got to stop.”
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