Huge row breaks out in Senate as Ted Cruz sharply criticizes Biden-nominated judge who put massive transgender child rapist in women’s prison

By Josh Boswell for Dailymail.com

05:07 May 23, 2024, updated 05:07 May 23, 2024

• The senator questioned a judicial candidate about her seemingly ideological decision
• She had agreed to transfer a biologically male child molester to a women’s prison

A Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday erupted in heated arguments over a Biden-nominated judge who sent a 6-foot-11 transgender woman convicted of multiple counts of child rape to a women’s prison.

New York Judge Sarah Netburn dismissed the Bureau of Prisons’ concerns about the safety of female inmates and transferred July Justine Shelby, born William McLain, to a women’s prison in August 2022.

Shelby, 60, was previously convicted in the state of Indiana in two separate cases of child molestation of a 9-year-old boy and rape of a 17-year-old girl, served 18 years in state prison, then violated probation and was sentenced to 15 years in state prison in 2017 for distributing child pornography sentenced.

During Netburn’s confirmation hearing for a federal judge position on Wednesday, Republican senators questioned her about the case.

Sen. Ted Cruz criticized Netburn for being “willing to undermine individual rights to satisfy her political ideology,” and Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana called her a “political activist” — allegations the judge rejected.

The hearing degenerated into a war of words between senators as Cruz accused Netburn of contradicting himself while new California Senator Laphonza Butler fought to regain control of the proceedings.

“You took a 6-foot-2 serial child molester with male genitalia and he said, ‘You know, I’d like to be in a women’s prison,’ and your response was, ‘That sounds great to me,'” Cruz said in a heated tirade.

“Let me ask you something: Do the other women in this prison have any rights?” Do they have the right not to have a 6-foot-tall serial rapist locked up as their cellmate?

Netburn said that after her initial 18-year sentence, Shelby has “serious medical needs” and “has not committed any acts of physical violence or sexual violence of any kind.”

Court documents show that Netburn dismissed the Bureau of Prison’s concerns about the threat posed by Shelby as “overblown.” She filed a report dated August 3, 2022, ordering the inmate transferred to FMC Carswell, a federal correctional facility for women in Fort Worth, Texas.

Shelby pleaded guilty in 1994 to raping nine- and 17-year-old children, when he was still performing under the name William McLain.

When he was released 18 years later, he violated his parole by using the Internet in his apartment and was re-incarcerated until 2015.

According to court documents, Shelby began hormone therapy for gender reassignment after her release at age 51 in August 2015.

But Shelby was arrested again a year later after police discovered that the rapist, now posing as a woman, had sent gruesome, graphic images of child pornography to registered sex offender Beau Thornburgh, whom Shelby had met during her 18-year incarceration in Indiana State Prison.

Shelby pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography and was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a federal court in Indianapolis, which he initially served at New York’s medium-security men’s prison, Otisville FCI.

She made legal attempts to get out of prison that had nothing to do with her gender, claiming, among other things, that she was not given adequate defense. These attempts failed.

And when she claimed that she was being denied her constitutional rights because she was housed with men, the prison service rejected her claims, saying that her transfer to a women’s prison would be “traumatizing and potentially dangerous” for the female inmates.

But in August 2022, Judge Netburn dismissed those concerns.

“There is no indication that the plaintiff is at risk of re-offending. The record contains no evidence of incidents of violence or assault while the plaintiff was in custody,” Netburn wrote.

She highlighted the testimony of Shelby, who said: “People see a 6’2″ tattooed prisoner, I see a girl.”

The judge ruled that “the theoretical threat of sexual assault by Plaintiff cannot readily support the BOP’s position” and ordered Shelby transferred to a women’s prison.

A report by the group Keep Prisons Single Sex USA, using data from the Freedom of Information Act, says there are about 1,980 transgender offenders in the federal system, 1,295 of whom are transgender men — half of whom were incarcerated for sex offenses.

Last year, the number of federal prisoners who identify as transgender increased by 23 percent.