The Virginian-Pilot
©
I know a guy who has had a lifelong weight problem. The bathroom scales are a roller coaster for him. He's up. He's down. He's up again. As his weight yo-yos, so does his health.
For years he's longed for weight-reduction surgery.
"If my health insurance covered it," he told me once, "I'd have it done in a second."
Alas, it isn't covered. Never mind that his doctors have told his insurer that the surgery would almost certainly cure his Type II diabetes. So far, the bean counters in a health insurance skyscraper somewhere have denied coverage.
I called this guy Friday and jokingly asked if he'd thought about robbing a bank.
"No," he replied. "Why?"
"Well, if you get away with the crime, you'll have enough loot for the operation," I told him.
"On the other hand, if you get caught and go to prison, you can lawyer up, head to court and try to force the taxpayers to foot the bill for your gastric-bypass surgery.
"It's a win-win situation," I said.
That's essentially what one inmate is doing. Ophe-lia De'lonta, aka Michael Stokes - a resident of the Buckingham Correctional Center - is trying to get the state to pick up the tab for a male-to-female sex-change operation.
De'lonta/Stokes has filed a suit in federal court that essentially claims that the commonwealth of Virginia is not providing adequate medical care because it won't pay for sex-change surgery.
It's just a zany lawsuit, you say. Unwinnable.
Don't be so sure.
In 2004, this same inmate went to court and successfully caused the commonwealth - that would be you and me - to pay for hormone treatment that put him on the road to womanhood.
It's seems to be the latest wrinkle in jailhouse litigation: Trying to get the public to pay for medical procedures that would be unavailable to law-abiding people without a lot of money.
The Associated Press reports that inmates in five states have sued for sex-change surgery. Four lost, but a case is pending in Massachusetts. That murderer has already scored publicly financed hormones and laser hair removal.
According to the Department of Corrections, De'lonta/Stokes has received sentences totaling 78 years and six months for a staggering assortment of offenses. When he was on the outside, he was a one-man crime spree.
His rap sheet includes 17 different convictions that hopscotch mostly around Northern Virginia.
He was found guilty of robbery seven times. Other convictions include three for weapons violations, one for malicious wounding, one for sodomy, and two for drug offenses.
News reports say that some of those crimes were committed to raise cash for sex-change surgery.
This is starting to look like a case of life imitating art. Remember the 1975 movie "Dog Day Afternoon"?
Based loosely on a real-life crime, an armed robber, played by Al Pacino, holds hostages in a New York bank after a robbery goes awry. The heist is part of an attempt to raise money for Pacino's boyfriend's sex-change operation.
If memory serves, that caper didn't work out well for the criminal. Perhaps De'lonta/Stokes should watch it.
Virginia has a simple rule for inmate medical treatment. It will pay "if a doctor or doctors feel a procedure is necessary to preserve life, reduce deterioration of health and to follow a community standard of care."
Makes sense. Under that humane but frugal guideline, sex-change surgery - and presumably weight-loss procedures and hair removal- would be off-limits to inmates.
Fleecing the public to pay for unnecessary surgical adventures that benefit thieves and murderers ought to be, well, a crime.
Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net


inmates rights
i do not understand what makes people that go to jail, think they should have more rights then the good people on the outside, if you go to jail then you have no right to have a sex change operation you have no right to have better health care then what i am paying for ,and useing my tax dollors, you are in jail you broke the law i did not, i fell you have lost your rights,you get food, clothes all on my tax dollors, i think the law has to change,be more like shieff joe enough is enough
re: inmates rights
You can thank the liberal lobby for that crap. Adequate medical care means that if you get the sniffles, you get some cold medicine. If you get a scrape, you get some peroxide and a band-aid. If you're stupid enough to contract an STD in jail, you get the treatment. Adequate medical care should only be concerned with keeping the prison environment as healthy as possible. I don't see how a sex change would help maintain a healthy environment for the other prisoners. Adequate medical care should be nothing more and nothing less than what I would be provided (at my own expense) at a clinic or the hospital, and trust me, I won't be paying for a sex-change anytime soon for myself...
If the surgery were provided
If the surgery were provided free, would the writer be in favor of it?
The way I see it...
The way I see it, we would be rewarding bad behavior if s/he got his/her penis chopped off at our expense. S/he has done nothing (nothing extraordinarily good) to deserve this kind of operation at our expense. I don't agree with the Commonwealth paying for the hormone treatment either. Instead of robbing and whatever else got you put in jail, you should have been working and saving, so that you could take a trip to Thailand (medical tourism) to get a sex change. I hear it's cheap there. I think the courts should tell him/her where to stick it...
What happens 6 months down
What happens 6 months down the road when he realizes that he made a mistake and sues the city for allowing this to happen?