The former Portsmouth police officer, Stephen Rankin, shot Chapman, 18, in the face and chest outside a Walmart store past year, after a security guard reported a theft from the store. The officer had been involved in another fatal on-duty encounter four years earlier, when he killed Kirill Denyakin, an unarmed 26-year-old cook from Kazakhstan, in a hail of 11 bullets.
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Former Portsmouth, Va., police officer Stephen Rankin, 36, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter on Thursday..
The incident took place on April 22, 2015 and Rankin was indicted by a grand jury for first degree murder in September, which led to his termination from the police department.
Chapman’s cousin Earl Lewis admitted that while the recommended sentence is less than they wanted, the guilty verdict is progress compared to the many, many cops who have been acquitted or not charged at all after killing Black men and women. Prosecutors also couldn’t share with the jury text messages Rankin sent before Chapman’s death; one read “people are just bad”, another referenced Sodom and Gomorrah. The guard did say he remembered Chapman raising both fists in a boxing stance and saying “Are you going to f–g shoot me” before he was shot from 5 yards away.
Rankin and another witness, a construction worker, said Chapman knocked the officer’s stun gun out of his hands.
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. “I wish this never happened”. “I can’t begin to fathom how much pain that family is going through”.
The family of Chapman, however, are far from satisfied with the manslaughter charges and are preparing a civil lawsuit that will hold the city of Portsmouth and former chief of police Ed Harris responsible for the hiring of Rankin, according to The Guardian. “I wish I could have done more to keep him alive”, he added.
“I had no reason to think he was going to stop attacking me”, Rankin said on the witness stand. “I was scared”.
The outcome is typical of the rare conviction that follows a shooting by police, said Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “Juries are very reluctant to convict an officer because they all recognize that policing is hard and violent”.
The conviction marks a departure from a series of acquittals of police officers in fatal shootings that have sparked outrage in the U.S. over the last few years. Now of course, use-of-force complaints are getting more scrutiny, and increasingly become national news.
In a similar case in Baltimore on Thursday, a jury convicted a police officer of assault for shooting an unarmed burglary suspect.
A jury convicted a former Portsmouth, Virginia, police officer of voluntary manslaughter on Thursday for the shooting death of 18-year-old William Chapman II last year, a court spokeswoman said.
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The defense called two police officers to testify on Rankin’s behalf, including one who was black.
