Daniel Ken Holtzclaw is a former Oklahoma City Police Department patrol officer. He was convicted in December 2015 of multiple counts of rape, sexual battery, forcible oral sodomy, and other sexual charges. On January 21, 2016, he was sentenced to 263 years in prison. On August 1, 2019, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld both his convictions and prison sentence. He has maintained his innocence in all of the charges against him.
About Daniel Holtzclaw in brief
Daniel Ken Holtzclaw is a former Oklahoma City Police Department patrol officer. He was convicted in December 2015 of multiple counts of rape, sexual battery, forcible oral sodomy, and other sexual charges. On January 21, 2016, he was sentenced to 263 years in prison. On August 1, 2019, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld both his convictions and prison sentence. The defense petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States on the basis that merging seventeen cases together “strains credulity.” The Supreme Court refused the petition on March 9, 2020, and denied the defense’s request for review of the case by the Court of Appeals. He has maintained his innocence in all of the charges against him. He played football as a linebacker at Eastern Michigan University, where he graduated with a degree in criminal justice in 2010. After graduating, Holtz Claw unsuccessfully attempted to get drafted into the NFL. Following that, he joined the Oklahoma City police Department. He is accused of sexually assaulting multiple African American women over the period between December 2013 and June 2014, targeting those from a poorer, majority black portion of the city. According to the police investigators, he ran background checks on women with outstanding warrants or other criminal records, and methodically targeted those victims. The offense that led to his arrest happened around 2:00 a.m. on June 18, 2014, after Holtz claw had already completed his shift on the northeast side of Oklahoma City and was driving to his residence in his assigned police vehicle.
Police said he made a traffic stop without reporting to police dispatch, running a records check on the driver, or revealing that he logged off of his patrol car computer. Jannie Ligons, a 57-year-old woman who was passing through the impoverished area that police said he had accosted, was not poor and had no police record. She testified that she had begged him to stop and was afraid for her life. While reviewing the case, the detectives remembered a previous report of forced oral sex committed by a police officer who said she was a victim of a sex-crimes. After being Mirandized, he underwent a two-hour interrogation during which he denied all accusations of misconduct. While he was released after the interrogation, his uniform cards, uniform badges, firearms, and keys to his police vehicle were seized, and he was placed on indefinite paid administrative leave. Two months later on August 21, 2014 he was arrested two months later and originally charged with 16 counts of sexual abuse, including forcible sexual sodomy and procuring lewd exhibition, stalking, and forcible sodomy. He pleaded not guilty to all charges; he was convicted on 18 of 36 charges, and on December 10, 2015, he received a sentence of 263 years behind bars. The prosecution argued that victims were deliberately chosen for these reasons, and that he abused his position as an officer by running background checks to find information that could be used to coerce victims into sex.
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This page is based on the article Daniel Holtzclaw published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
