Even after a district court dismissed his client’s case and a federal court affirmed that decision, a Georgia lawyer has said he refuses to give up on a plaintiff’s quest to hold the Georgia Department of Corrections accountable for allegedly violating a constitutional right to protection.

But Mableton attorney McNeill Stokes knows he faces an uphill battle to prove prison wardens and their corrections staff allegedly acted with “deliberate indifference” by allegedly failing to protect a transgender inmate from attacks by other inmates under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a federal law enacted in 1993 to deter the sexual assault of prisoners.