Daniel Holtzclaw

Daniel Ken Holtzclaw (born December 10, 1986) is a former police officer in the United States.

Daniel Holtzclaw was born December 10, 1986, in the U.S. territory of Guam, to Eric, a German-American, and a Japanese mother, Kumiko Holtzclaw.

His father is a lieutenant with the police department in Enid, Oklahoma.

Holtzclaw graduated from Enid High School in 2005.

While there he played football as a linebacker, setting a school record for 25 tackles in a game.

He played linebacker at Eastern Michigan University, where he graduated with a degree in criminal justice in 2010.

After graduating, Holtzclaw unsuccessfully attempted to get drafted into the NFL.

Following that, he joined the Oklahoma City Police Department.

Holtzclaw was 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 police investigators, Holtzclaw ran background checks on women with outstanding warrants or other criminal records, and methodically targeted those victims.

Their investigation covered a six-month period, beginning with the first woman who was willing to come forward, a woman whom Holtzclaw arrested for drug possession in December 2013 and then forced oral sodomy from while she was handcuffed to a hospital bed.

The offense that led to Holtzclaw's arrest happened around 2:00 a.m. on June 18, 2014, after Holtzclaw had already completed his shift on the northeast side of Oklahoma City and was driving to his residence in his assigned police vehicle.

During that time, police said, Holtzclaw 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.

The driver was Jannie Ligons, a 57-year-old woman who was passing through the impoverished area that police said Holtzclaw was targeting.

Unlike other women that police said he had accosted, she was not poor and had no police record.

Ligons said that before forcing her to perform oral sex on him, Holtzclaw made her lift her shirt and pull down her pants.

She testified that she had begged him to stop and was afraid for her life.

Ligons promptly filed a police report.

When Holtzclaw reported to the OKCPD Springlake Division station the following afternoon for his daily 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift, he was pulled aside and driven to the department's Sex Crimes Unit by detectives Kim Davis and Rocky Gregory for questioning.

After being Mirandized, Holtzclaw underwent a two-hour interrogation during which he denied all accusations of misconduct during the Ligons stop earlier that morning, and buccal swabs were taken for DNA comparison.

At the conclusion of the interrogation, the two detectives told Holtzclaw that they believed that he was being untruthful based both on previous evidence and on statements made by his 25-year-old cohabiting girlfriend, that countered claims Holtzclaw had made to the detectives.

While he was released after the interrogation, Holtzclaw's commission and entry cards, uniform shirt and pants, badges, firearms (handgun and shotgun), radio, and keys to his assigned police vehicle were seized, and he was placed on indefinite paid administrative leave.

After further investigation eventually turned up a dozen additional complainants, Holtzclaw was arrested two months later on August 21, 2014, and originally charged with 16 (and eventually 36) counts of sexual abuse offenses including rape in the first and second degrees, sexual battery, procuring lewd exhibition, stalking, and forcible oral sodomy.

While reviewing Ligons' case, the two sex-crimes detectives remembered a previous report of forced oral sex committed by a police officer.

Looking back through police records, the detectives found the report of a woman who said she was stopped in May 2014 and driven to an isolated area by an officer who forced her to perform oral sex.

No action had been taken at the time of her report, but when the detectives contacted the woman, she showed them the route that the officer had taken on the night of the attack, and it matched Holtzclaw's GPS route that evening.

The detectives then reviewed Holtzclaw's automatically recorded history of running names through the department's two databases, looking specifically for people who had been checked out multiple times, and they contacted those women.

In the initial investigation, six women were willing to come forward to testify, and the GPS device on Holtzclaw's patrol car put him at the scene of the alleged incidents.

Police records showed that he had called in for a warrant check on all of them.

He was convicted in December 2015 of multiple counts of rape, sexual battery, and other sex offenses while working for the Oklahoma City Police Department.

Holtzclaw was convicted of eighteen counts involving eight different women.

According to the police investigators, Holtzclaw abused his position as an officer by running background checks to find information that could be used to coerce victims into sex.

During the trial, the defense questioned the victims' credibility during cross-examination, bringing up their criminal records.

Of the thirteen women who accused Holtzclaw, several had criminal histories such as drug arrests, and all of them were African American.

The prosecution argued that victims were deliberately chosen by Holtzclaw for these reasons.

Holtzclaw pleaded not guilty to all charges.

On December 10, 2015, he was convicted on 18 of 36 charges, and on January 21, 2016, he was sentenced to 263 years in prison, a de facto sentence of life in prison.

On August 1, 2019, Holtzclaw was denied an appeal by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, which 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".

On March 9, 2020, the Supreme Court refused the petition.