Former Oklahoma police officer Daniel Holtzclaw guilty of multiple rapes while on-duty

His father – a police officer in Enid, about 100 miles northwest of Oklahoma City – his mother and sister were in the courtroom as the verdict was read. He could be sentenced to up to 263 years in prison. Holtzclaw openly cried in the courtroom as judge Timothy Henderson read the verdict, with the jury finding him guilty on 18 out of 36 counts involving eight of the 13 women (paywall) who testified against him.

Jurors are set to resume deliberations in the trial of a former Oklahoma City police officer accused of sexually victimizing 13 women in the low-income neighborhood he patrolled.

He was accused of attacking 13 women and threatening them with arrest unless they complied.

They said he did this because he did not think authorities would take the victims’ word over his if he had to defend himself against sexual assault allegations.

He called Holtzclaw a young, vigilant officer who cared about meeting people in the community and unfairly “turned out to be the villain”.

Holtzclaw’s litany of charges included first-degree rape, sexual battery, indecent exposure, stalking, forcible oral sodomy and burglary.

Prosecutors alleged that Holtzclaw inappropriately touched the girl while driving her to her mother’s house. He pleaded not guilty to all of the allegations. Holtzclaw faces the chance of spending the rest of his life in prison; he’ll be sentenced next month. They were nearly all poor and black.

The victims said they met Holtzclaw while he was on duty, and prosecutors said the ex-officer intimidated them into not reporting his crimes. The officer often threatened victims with arrest and violence if they did not cooperate. During cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses, his attorney questioned why most of the women didn’t come forward until police identified them as possible victims. “And he was like, ‘This is, you know, better than the county, ‘” she testified.

But it was a 57-year-old grandmother, whom Holtzclaw forced to give him oral sex in the back of his squad auto, that blew the lid of his sexual attacks. Some with addiction issues, and criminal records. A middle-class woman, she was passing through the neighborhood where Holtzclaw stopped her but did not live there. They argued that Holtzclaw is an upstanding, three-year veteran of the police force and an “all-American good guy”.

Holtzclaw’s attorney, meanwhile, described him as a model police officer whose attempts to help the drug addicts and prostitutes he came in contact with were distorted.

The jury had deliberated those counts since Monday evening in a trial that began in early November.