A person chooses to become a police officer knowing that it’s a position of honor and trust. Daniel Holtzclaw was found guilty of rape in Oklahoma, but rape culture is still being let off the hook.
Advertisement
(Nate Billings/The Oklahoman via AP).
Ligons later went to police and media outlets with the first complaint against Holtzclaw, she said.
The all-white Oklahoma County jury also acquitted Holtzclaw on 18 counts, but the officer sobbed as the 18 guilty verdicts were announced, at one point placing his face down on the courtroom table as if in disbelief.
When Holtzclaw was sacked, the police chief wrote it was the “Greatest abuse of police authority I have witnessed”. At left is defense attorney Robert Gray.
Hill has filed a state civil lawsuit against Holtzclaw and Oklahoma City. Holtzclaw, a former Oklahoma City police officer, was facing dozens of charges alleging he sexually assaulted several women while on duty.
A grandmother’s bravery in telling her story made all the difference this time. On Thursday, the jury convicted Holtzclaw for forcing her to perform oral sex at a traffic stop.
“I didn’t do anything wrong”.
“He just picked the wrong lady to stop that night”, said Liggons. He faced 36 counts total, but was ultimately convicted on 18 counts to eight of the victims. “I kept begging, ‘Sir, don’t make me do this, don’t make me do this, sir”.
Using some back-of-the-envelope math, he’s racked up about 263 years of jail time which is just short of how long the legal rape of black women by white men lasted in America.
Holtzclaw, whose father is white and mother is Japanese, is identified as “Asian or Pacific Islander” by court records.
Another victim, Shardarion Hill, told reporters Holtzclaw pulled her over in December 2013, and she was later taken to a hospital on the other side of town.
Jeffrey Pelo, a former police sergeant in Bloomington, Illinois, was found guilty of 35 counts of aggravated sexual assault against four women from 2002 to 2005, according to media reports.
Oklahoma County District Judge Timothy Henderson declined to elaborate on the nature of the jurors’ questions while deliberations continue, but said such questions are not unusual.
Rachel Anspach, of the African American Policy Forum at Columbia Law School, noted that his conviction was still an anomaly. Upon returning home, she told her daughter what happened, and the two women chose to report him. This conviction says all women – regardless of race, income and lifestyle – deserve to be heard and protected. “The odds were completely against it”. Only 40 percent of these led to an arrest or some other kind of closure, according to an Federal Bureau of Investigation study of rapes reported in 2010. You’re going to shoot me’. When asked, those victimized said they never considered contacting police about the attacks for an obvious reason: Holtzclaw was the police. The very few who are tried in court can be portrayed as heroes, swaying juries.
Holtzclaw’s case was studied as a member of a yearlong Associated Press investigation that disclosed about 1,000 policemen nationally had their permits for sex crimes misconduct over a sexual or other six-year span. That means the jurors didn’t believe some of the 13 victims who testified on the stand. That means a jury could clearly see a police officer was involved in a deliberate organized process of raping poor black women but somehow, some way, some of the victims still didn’t pass the smell test for this jury.
Investigators found other victims through records of the background checks Holtzclaw had requested, and noticed that in many cases, the Global Positioning System locator in his squad auto was switched off. He was sacked and then jailed as other victims emerged.
“That’s not an accident”, he said.
Advertisement
Contributors include Nomaan Merchant in Dallas; Matt Sedensky in West Palm Beach, Florida; and Tim Talley in Oklahoma City.
