SCOTUS Declines To Hear Appeal Of Daniel Holtzclaw

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The United States Supreme Court denied a petition to hear the appeal of former Oklahoma City cop Daniel Holtzclaw, 33, on Monday, KFOR reports.

In August 2014, Holtzclaw, was charged with 36 felony counts of rape, sexual battery, indecent exposure and forcible oral sodomy after the 13 women accused the officer of assault while they were in custody or inside his police car. In 2015, a jury convicted Holtzclaw of 18 felony charges involving eight of the 13 accusers, all of whom were Black women.

He is currently serving a 263-year sentence for his convictions.

Holtzclaw’s petition submitted on behalf of his lawyers admonished the amount of accusers who were allowed to testify in front of the jury, and also accused prosecutors of misrepresenting DNA evidence.

“What the State really did is join weak cases with ones slightly less weak in the hope of convicting on all of them,” his attorney wrote in a petition, according to the report. “It strains credulity to believe that the State would have obtained the convictions that it did had the cases not been joined.”

Holtzclaw, a former NFL player, oftentimes used his size and position as law enforcement to intimidate the women, forcing them to undergo the acts while he purposefully surveyed low-income neighborhoods, scouring for underserved women. At the time of his arrest, Holtzclaw was reportedly being investigated by the Oklahoma City Police Department sex crimes unit.

His arrest was also the work of local grassroots organizers and activists who believed and championed his accusers, causing the case to receive the important local and national news attention it deserved.

After his conviction Holtzclaw and his attorneys took his appeal to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, which denied his case in August.

A trial over the civil cases filed against Holtzclaw and the city by some of his accusers will begin this summer in Oklahoma City federal court, according to The Oklahoman.