Former Portsmouth police officer Stephen Rankin faces up to ten years in prison for the death of William Chapman, who was killed last April in a Walmart parking lot as Rankin attempted to apprehend the 18-year-old under suspicion the teen had shoplifted, Huffington Post reports.
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The jury did not convict on the first-degree murder charge prosecutors sought in the case of the Portsmouth police officer, who was sacked as he awaited trial.
“We had to start somewhere”, said Lewis. “This was the beginning”.
Stephen Rankin, who was sacked from the Portsmouth police force after being indicted, now faces one to 10 years in prison.
While the case previously failed to receive the same amount of national attention of similar killings of unarmed Black men at the hands of law enforcement, this trial and subsequent verdict come at a time when racial tensions within the nation are at a palpable high following the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
The jury of seven women and five men deliberated for 13 hours after hearing four days of detailed testimony from witnesses to the shooting, a series of experts and Rankin himself.
Rankin “brought a gun to what at worst was a fistfight”, argued Portsmouth commonwealth attorney Stephanie Morales. There was no video evidence of the incident, and many details remain disputed.
But Gregory Provo, the Wal-Mart security guard who reported Chapman to police, testified that Chapman never charged at the officer. He said Chapman raised both fists like a boxer and asked if the officer was going to shoot him before Rankin fired at him from about 5 yards away.
Rankin had received several excessive force complaints in the time leading up to Chapman’s killing, and one of his former colleagues described the officer as being “afraid of his own shadow”. Rankin ended up tasing Chapman, which led to a fight between the two.
“I had no reason to think he was going to stop attacking me”, said Rankin. But criminal charges are rare in police-involved shootings, and convictions are even more uncommon.
On-duty officers kill about 1,000 suspects a year in the United States, but only 74 have been charged since 2005, said Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. A third of these were convicted, a third were not and the other cases are pending. “The city of Portsmouth through its officials, in particular, it’s police chief had knowleged about conduct related to this officer which should have had him removed from the police department”, Babineau said. “Juries are very reluctant to convict an officer because they all recognize that policing is hard and violent”, he said.
A file image showed investigators at the shooting scene.
In stories July 29 to August 3 about a San Diego police shooting, The Associated Press, relying on information from the San Diego Police Department, misspelled the last name of a slain officer. Eight Black and four white jurors found him guilty of the lesser manslaughter charge, the spokeswoman said.
After fatally shooting the teen in the face and chest, Rankin allegedly told a witness, “This is my second one”. “We don’t have any problems with policemen or police officers”.
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In 2011, Kazakhstan’s Kirill Denyakin was shot and killed by Rankin.
