Nearly a decade ago, Harold Seymore was charged with sexually assaulting a female tourist on South Beach. Last week, Seymore was finally convicted of the crime — but as a woman.
Seymore’s story is a complicated one, an unusually long grind through both the criminal justice and mental health systems, all while struggling with gender identification issues. Born intersex, with functioning male and female reproductive organs, she has slowly transitioned to a woman.
For the first time in her life, Seymore donned a dress last week as she sat in a Miami-Dade courtroom to face jurors.
Her change in appearance from the 2005 arrest never took center stage but surfaced in subtle ways over four days of trial. Witnesses described a tall lanky man behind the assault. But defense attorneys, despite occasional slip-ups, made sure to call Seymore “she” while prosecutors used a neutral “the defendant.”
For Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Teresa Mary Pooler, she was “Miss Seymore.”
It took jurors just an hour to convict Seymore. On Friday, Pooler sentenced her to 15 years in prison, plus 10 years of probation. Because of her long criminal history, Seymore was designated a habitual violent offender.
Shackled and wearing an orange jump suit for the sentencing, Seymore, 31, expressed regret.
“It wasn’t my intention for this to happen,” Seymore told the victim, a 37-year-old schoolteacher from outside Chicago. “I honestly apologize for what happened.”
Transgender defendants aren’t all that unusual in South Florida, and Miami-Dade jails have special protocols for handling them. But Seymore’s case is rare — an intersex person who has gender transitioned over the decade it took to bring the case to trial.
During her years in Miami-Dade jails, Seymore was always housed in single-person safety cells, away from the male population. In the coming weeks, Seymore will be transferred to the state prison system, where she’ll be evaluated and possibly housed away from the general population with other at-risk inmates needing “protective management.”
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