A Baltimore woman who spent more than two months in jail awaiting trial on hate crimes charges was sentenced to time served Thursday for spray-painting a transgender symbol near a Catholic elementary school in Easton.

Sian Radaskiewicz-King, a 32-year-old transgender woman, pleaded guilty to defacing the property of a religious institution and malicious destruction of property, both misdemeanors. She will serve an additional five years of probation with an electronic monitor.

The case divided the Eastern Shore community and alarmed LGBTQIA+ advocates, who said the transgender symbol — which portrays the symbols for male and female with a third spoke that combines the two — should not be the basis for hate crime charges. Police accused Radaskiewicz-King of spray-painting the symbol at several locations near Saints Peter and Paul Elementary School on the night of Sept. 4.

Parents at the Catholic school said the symbols caused panic because they appeared eight days after a mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic Church was carried out by a shooter who identified as transgender.

Investigators haven’t linked the Annunciation Catholic Church shooter’s gender identity to a motive for the attack, but members of the Trump administration and conservative commentators quickly claimed the shooting was evidence of “transgender violence.”

Radaskiewicz-King, who was visiting her mother in Easton, also spray-painted the symbol near several businesses within walking distance of her mother’s house that night and the next day, police wrote in charging documents, tagging a fence outside a liquor store, the ground outside an Ulta Beauty, and a brick archway outside a shipping center.

When police arrested her, Radaskiewicz-King said she had been spray-painting the symbol “because she wanted people to know what the symbol meant, and to create a sense of space for herself,” according to the documents.

She was charged with violating Maryland’s hate crimes statutes, including the use of a hate symbol to intimidate a group. That section of the law refers to “an actual or depicted noose or swastika” as examples of hate symbols.

Judges in Talbot County have held Radaskiewicz-King in jail without bail ever since, citing concerns for public safety. According to her lawyer, Radaskiewicz-King has been jailed with men and denied access to hormone treatment.

Members of the church community said they feared a “copycat” shooting after the tragedy in Minneapolis, which left three dead, including the shooter. The shooter had previously attended the Catholic school she targeted.

Though the Minneapolis shooter wrote about feeling disillusionment with being trans in notebooks made public after her death in the attack, she also expressed beliefs that are far more common among mass shooters: hyper-online nihilism and an obsession with other mass killers.

Politicized misinformation has created the false impression that there is a growing wave of “transgender violence” in the United States, but trans people are responsible for a vanishingly small number of mass shootings and are more likely to be victims of crime. Nearly all mass shootings are carried out by cisgender men, according to the Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University.

Radaskiewicz-King previously attended Saints Peter and Paul school and alleged that she had been bullied as a student there when police arrested her. She also claimed not to have heard about the shooting in Minneapolis because she had stopped watching the news.

Joseph Coale, the state’s attorney for Talbot County who prosecuted the case, said Radaskiewicz-King’s anger toward the school was a clear warning sign. Her mother also owned two handguns, Coale said.

“When we have these school shootings, the question that’s usually asked is, are there red flags?” Coale said in court this week.

The school’s attorney, Jeffrey P. Bowman, also highlighted the church community’s fear of a similar shooting after the mass killing in Minneapolis. He said the school has spent $200,000 on additional safety measures since the vandalism appeared on its property in September.

“Nothing I say today has anything to do with the transgender identity,” he said in court. “The school sincerely feels they are not safe with this individual being released.”

But those concerns bumped up against a simple reality of the criminal justice system this week: You can only hold someone in jail on misdemeanor charges for so long. The hearing this week initially began as a bail review but switched to a plea and sentencing hearing after Judge Theresa Adams appeared to encourage the prosecution and defense to reach an agreement.

The most serious charges against Radaskiewicz-King carried a possible prison term of up to three years, but because Radaskiewicz-King had no prior criminal record, sentencing guidelines likely would have called for her to receive a sentence of probation to six months in jail.

Adams, a senior judge who retired from the Frederick County bench in 2023, recently took over Radaskiewicz-King’s case after Talbot County’s only circuit judge recused himself at the defense’s request because his children attend the Saints Peter and Paul school. He had previously ordered Radaskiewicz-King held in jail without bail.

“I’m very well aware of the emotions of this community,” Adams said from the bench Thursday. “I hope the effect on the community is assuaged by the court fashioning a sentence with a long term of probation and electronic monitoring.”

Radaskiewicz-King will not be allowed within 25 miles of the Saints Peter and Paul school and is forbidden from possessing a firearm as a condition of her probation.

Her lawyer, Lawrence Greenberg, said that if Radaskiewicz-King successfully completes a year of probation with no violations, he may seek a reduced sentence for his client.

“This was never about danger,” he said after the sentencing. “It was about discrimination.”

Radaskiewicz-King was not immediately available for comment.

Tina Grace Jones, the cofounder of the Delmarva Pride Center, said the heated national conversation surrounding transgender people contributed to what happened in Easton.

“For me personally, I thought this could happen to me,” she continued. “I could be that person sitting in the cell, as a trans woman, because of the heightened targeting of the trans community that’s been going on for the last year.”

David Jaros, the faculty director of Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the University of Baltimore School of Law, called the use of hate crimes charges in this case “utterly ridiculous.”

Law enforcement had other options besides incarcerating Radaskiewicz-King to protect the community, he said, such as asking her mother to surrender her firearms or using pretrial electronic monitoring.

“I think it’s sadly a symptom of the public discourse over trans rights and trans issues,” he said, “but this seems like a gross abuse of the law.”