Rankin shot Chapman in the face and chest outside a Wal-Mart store past year after a security guard had called police to go after the young man.
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No video exists of the killing that took place on April 22, 2015, and testimony conflicted on the details, but most witnesses said Chapman had his hands up.
For instance, numerous witnesses who testified in the case said Chapman had his hands in the air when the officer approached him, Huffington Post reports.
While the jury convicted Rankin on the charge of voluntary manslaughter, a sigh of relief is almost absent as they denied to convict him on more serious charges of first degree murder, choosing to recommend a sentence of two and a half years with Chapman’s mother remarking that “it’s not enough”.
The jury did not convict on the first-degree murder charge prosecutors sought.
Gregory Provo, the Wal-Mart security guard who reported the shoplifting allegation, testified Chapman never charged at the officer.
The judge also refused to allow testimony about Chapman’s own criminal record.
The Virginia trial coincides with a nationwide controversy simmering over the use of deadly force by police against African-Americans.
Prosecutors argued that Rankin killed Chapman during what had amounted to little more than a fist-fight in a Walmart parking lot in Portsmouth, about 175 miles south of Washington. The Chapman family plans to file a civil suit against the city, claiming Rankin should have never been hired to serve to begin with.
Rankin, who was sacked after his murder indictment, had already killed another unarmed suspect four years earlier.
Juries are very reluctant to convict on-duty officers of murder “because they all recognize that policing is hard and violent”, Stinson said. Rankin claimed even though he ordered Chapman to the ground, Chapman taunted him and charged him “aggressively”.
In this image made from a video, former police officer Stephen Rankin listens to the proceedings after the verdict was read Thursday, Aug. 4, 2016, in Portsmouth, Va. A jury convicted Rankin of voluntary manslaughter on Thursday in the shooting death of an unarmed black man who had been accused of shoplifting.
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.
Stinson’s data don’t include cases in which civilians died in police custody or were killed by other means, or those in which officers faced only lesser charges. Rankin was eventually fired from the Portsmouth Police Department as he awaited trial for Chapman’s death.
In the predominantly black town of Portsmouth, and nation-wide, the case was seen as a referendum on police accountability.
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The jurors were not informed, however, that the former officer had previously shot and killed an unarmed Kazakh hotel cook, Kirill Ivanovich Denyakin, four years prior to the night that Chapman was slain. “I did everything that I could”, Rankin said on the stand. “We certainly think that if the jury knew the whole story about Mr. Chapman and his prior convictions and the contents of the book bag, these that were kept from the jury, I think we’d certainly had different results”, said Broccoletti.
