DANIEL HOLTZCLAW IS GUILTY — Live With It

In December 2015, Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted of 18 sexual offences against vulnerable women, a crime spree that earned him a sentence of 263 years without parole.  In 2019, the Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld all his convictions, and in February this year, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear a further appeal. Even so, there are people who are still fighting for him, including women.

This week, a campaigning organisation interviewed one of his female supporters, Kay Sanders, at length, a woman who didn’t appear to know what she was talking about. 

The Holtzclaw case has been blown up into something more controversial than it is because all his victims were black and he isn’t. The usual suspects tried to make it about so-called racism and even white supremacy, a phrase that was hardly heard in the United States before Donald Trump decided to run for office. Holtzclaw isn’t white, his mother is Japanese, something that would make his case of supreme disinterest to genuine white supremacists. So what happened?

Holtzclaw was a police officer in Oklahoma City. In June 2014, he stopped a black motorist in the small hours while on his way home from work, and after putting her in the back of his car, forced her to perform oral sex on him. He thought he could get away with this because she had a quantity of drugs in her car which although not illegal, she shouldn’t have had. This appears to have been his modus operandi, he would stop a young woman, find drugs on her, then give her a choice: arrest or the other thing. Most chose the other thing. Feminists often use the phrase vulnerable woman meaning any woman who is allegedly victimised by a man, but these women were genuinely vulnerable, they were at the bottom of the food chain, having been involved in prostitution, some were drug addicts, one even turned up at court stoned.

Jannie Liggons wasn’t. She was an older woman, had no criminal history to speak of, and was driving her own car. Not being a drug addict or a prostitute, she didn’t understand what was required of her, and went straight to the police. A woman of that age and background is a lot more credible than a younger woman, and false allegations of that nature do happen. A classic one was caught on dashcam in February 1996 when a young woman was given a ticket by a traffic cop at Palm Beach, Florida. At that time, the quality of dashcams was extremely poor, but it was clear the motorist never got out of her car and was handed a ticket through the window.

Holtzclaw had no dashcam recording, which again was part of his modus operandi. Kay Sanders doesn’t appear to have realised this. After the Liggons complaint, detectives went looking for other victims. This wasn’t a trawling exercise, but it would have been irresponsible of them not to. They found a number of women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Holtzclaw. There were also a number of false allegations. These could very likely have been avoided if the usual suspects hadn’t blown up the case with public protests, again about so-called racism. That being said, the investigation was as low key as possible, and a number of accusers were found credible. He did not take the stand at his trial.

Holtzclaw’s supporters chose to focus on the DNA evidence. DNA profiling is an art that has been dressed up by scientists and presented to the public as magic. If there is a fair quantity, a bloody handprint, for example, it is totally unambiguous, but for extremely small quantities and touch DNA it can be useless or even misleading. Again, apart from the Liggons testimony, which was found credible, Holtzclaw was doing all sorts of things that he shouldn’t have. For one thing, in 2014, no male police officer anywhere should have been searching female suspects much less stopping women in the street and searching them. At the very least this should be done by two officers, the active searcher being a female.

The main claim of Holtzclaw’s supporters now is that he has been stitched up by other officers. Anyone familiar with the blue code or the privilege money can’t buy will realise this claim doesn’t hold water. There are plenty of men out there who really have been falsely accused and thrown to the wolves. Women Against False Accusations should focus on them and leave Daniel Holtzclaw to rot.