Daniel Holtzclaw Victims

Case background and investigation

Daniel Holtzclaw was a patrol officer with the Oklahoma City Police Department who worked an evening shift, from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., in the north-east of the city. According to Wikipedia's summary of the case, the offences for which he was tried took place between December 2013 and June 2014.

The investigation started with a single complaint. NBC News reported that a woman in her fifties came forward after an encounter with Holtzclaw on June 18, 2014. Wikipedia states that she had been stopped in her car at about 2 a.m. and reported the assault to police straight away. Sex crimes detectives then reviewed Holtzclaw's record of name checks on police databases and contacted women he had looked up, Wikipedia says, and GPS records from his patrol car were used to place him at the locations the women described, as CBS News also reported. Holtzclaw was arrested on August 21, 2014, and was dismissed from the department before his trial.

He was charged with 36 counts, among them first- and second-degree rape, forcible oral sodomy, sexual battery, procuring lewd exhibition, burglary, indecent exposure and stalking. Thirteen women, all of them Black, testified at a trial lasting about a month in late 2015. According to NBC News, several said he had threatened them with arrest over outstanding warrants or drug paraphernalia. The defence challenged the credibility of the accusers, and Holtzclaw did not give evidence.

On December 10, 2015, after about 45 hours of deliberation, the jury convicted him on 18 counts and acquitted him on the other 18, The Guardian and CBS News reported. The guilty verdicts related to eight of the thirteen women and comprised four counts of first-degree rape, one of second-degree rape, four of forcible oral sodomy, six of sexual battery and three of procuring lewd exhibition. The jury recommended sentences totalling 263 years, and the judge imposed that term on January 21, 2016, according to CBS News and Wikipedia.

Holtzclaw has maintained his innocence. His appeal questioned, among other things, the DNA evidence: Wikipedia notes that skin-cell DNA from one accuser was found on his uniform trousers and that the defence attributed it to indirect transfer. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the convictions on August 1, 2019. The US Supreme Court docket for case 19-843 shows that his petition for review was denied on March 9, 2020.

Because he was acquitted on half of the counts, the allegations of five of the thirteen women did not result in convictions. The record here describes only the conduct for which he was found guilty as established.