By VennerRoad, 23rd Jan 2017
Is Daniel Holtzclaw the victim of a massive injustice? Michelle Malkin seems to think so, but there is no need for you to.
Holtzclaw – the predator with a badge.
If the name is not familiar to you, rogue Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted of eighteen sexual offences against women while on duty and sentenced to a massive 263 years behind bars. The verdicts were returned on his twenty-ninth birthday – December 10, 2015; he was sentenced formally the following month.
Holtzclaw’s nemesis was a woman named Jannie Ligons; a mother, grandmother and small business person, she was driving her own car when he stopped her on a spurious pretext and forced her to perform oral sex on him. Before then all his victims had been women who don’t matter: prostitutes, drug addicts, women who have little or no credibility because among their other dubious talents they have a propensity to lie. All his victims including Ligons were black, which of course brought the usual suspects crawling out from under their rocks, but their race was not important, nor was their social status or lack thereof to District Attorney David Prater whose meticulous prosecution of the case put Holtzclaw where he belongs. Now, media pundit Michelle Malkin has put together a two part series that questions the veracity of the evidence against Holtzclaw.
The first thing most people will ask is can all those women really be lying? This sounds a valid question, but those who have studied similar cases realise it is not necessarily so. Whenever a celebrity is accused of some sexual offence, there is the chance or even the likelihood women, and on occasion men, will come forward making similar allegations. At times this can descend into farce, as in the case of veteran comedian Bill Cosby. There are several reasons for this, and anyone who has seen some of the gratuitous violence meted out by the American police to especially blacks up to and including murder will not be too surprised that any black individual might jump at the chance to frame a cop, even one who is only half-white.
There can be what is known in psychology as a bandwagon effect – as in the Cosby case – and this is what Holtzclaw supporters allege happened here. There have in fact been at least seven people who have made false allegations against Holtzclaw – one of them a man! Not mentioned by Michelle Malkin was that one of these false accusers nearly ended up in gaol. After pleading guilty to filing a false report, on March 30, 2016, Shaneice Barksdale walked away with a non-custodial sentence and a financial penalty.
Whether or not there is a media bandwagon, when the police go trawling for victims, they often find them. This is something else Holtzclaw supporters claim, although the word trawl or declensions thereof is not used in this documentary. While the police did in fact trawl for further accusers, it would have been irresponsible for them not to have done so. To begin with, Jannie Ligons was not the only woman to make a recent allegation of sexual abuse against an Oklahoma police officer under broadly similar circumstances; the other allegation had been filed away because it was made by one of those women who don’t matter.
These investigations were low key, and indeed media coverage of the Holtzclaw case was muted until the actual trial. Probably the local media was warned to cool it both on account of the likelihood of false accusers crawling out of the woodwork and exploitation by race-baiters.
While the Malkin documentary makes a full-blooded attempt to discredit all the accusers, including Ligons, there is just too much evidence. After the legal proceedings were out of the way, a 20/20 documentary called What The Dash Cam Never Saw covered the other evidence Holtzclaw supporters do not talk about. By his own admission he put rather a lot of women into the back of his car, violating protocol. Then there was the little matter of the woman he visited at home in his own car. Most significantly, Holtzclaw did not testify at trial; had these been historical allegations that would have been understandable because a bland denial would have been less risky than attempting to wrack his memory and making a mistake which the prosecution could exploit. Which brings us to the inconsistencies in this case.
In a criminal trial of any complexity there will always be inconsistencies in eyewitness testimony, in documentary, even in forensic evidence. This is well recognised, and there is case law on it. Indeed, in many cases there will be perjury on both sides. Perjury aside, people’s memories are not only fallible but malleable. The big question though is, are the inconsistencies in the case against Holtzclaw so great as to invalidate all eighteen guilty verdicts? Clearly the answer is no, and however much effort Malkin and Holtzclaw’s supporters put into this case, there is no shaking the testimony of Jannie Ligons.
Malkin is running a fool’s errand. It is possible that an appellate court might throw out one of two of Holtzclaw’s convictions, but not enough for him to see Halley’s Comet when it returns in 2061. If she or anyone else wants to challenge what is wrongly perceived here as corroboration by volume, they can start with a proper examination of the claims against Bill Cosby. Many of his accusers are refuted by chronology, but that has not prevented the media from parroting or simply ignoring the facts. Cosby is soon to face trial, but meanwhile in London, another veteran comedian is on his second trial.
Rolf Harris is already serving a sentence after being convicted of imaginary crimes on the contrived testimony of a gaggle of demented women, and if the likes of Gloria Allred get their way, so will any man in America who is accused of the violation of a woman at any time in the past on nothing more than therapy-induced memories, delusions, or simply viciousness.
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