Stephen Rankin, who had been charged with first-degree murder, convicted of voluntary manslaughter in killing of 18-year-old over alleged shoplifting.
A police officer in southern Virginia was convicted of manslaughter and jurors recommended a sentence of two and a half years in prison on Thursday for his fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old during a confrontation over a suspected shoplifting.
Jurors at Portsmouth circuit court found Stephen Rankin guilty of voluntary manslaughter for killing William Chapman in April last year. It was Rankin’s second fatal shooting of an unarmed man in the city.
Chapman’s mother, Sallie, wept as the verdict was read out by the court clerk. Rankin stared directly ahead as his supporters sat in silence.
Rankin had been charged with first-degree murder and using a firearm to commit a felony but the judge had told jurors they could convict him on lesser charges.
The jury of seven women and five men deliberated for 13 hours after hearing four days of detailed testimony from witnesses to the shooting, a series of experts and Rankin himself. Rankin, 36, was terminated from his job at the police department after being indicted for murder.
Prosecutors argued that Rankin intentionally killed Chapman with premeditation after Chapman resisted arrest and defied his orders. The officer tried to stop Chapman in the parking lot of a Walmart superstore on the morning of 22 April 2015 to investigate a suspected theft from the store.
“The law does not say that because you do not comply you have to die,” commonwealth’s attorney Stephanie Morales said during her closing argument on Tuesday. Morales told jurors that Chapman should have “lived to face prosecution” for resisting arrest or assaulting an officer.
“The defendant brought a gun to what at worst was a fistfight,” she said.
Rankin and his attorneys had insisted, however, that the officer opened fire only as a last resort after Chapman fought with him aggressively and then charged towards him. Rankin had tried to subdue Chapman with his Taser but the weapon was then knocked from his hand, they said.
“He didn’t have a choice. He didn’t have an option. He didn’t have anything else left to do,” James Broccoletti, Rankin’s lead attorney, said in his closing argument. “It’s easy for us to ‘Monday morning quarterback’. It’s easy for us to look back with 20/20 hindsight and say ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda’.”
During several hours of testimony on Tuesday, Rankin told jurors that he did not want to hurt or kill Chapman but was compelled to fire. “I felt I needed to save my life,” he said. Rankin said he immediately carried out CPR on the 18-year-old to try to keep him alive.
Jurors were not told that Rankin had shot and killed Kirill Denyakin, an unarmed hotel cook, four years before his confrontation with Chapman.
Rankin said Denyakin, 26, reached into his waistband and charged at the officer during a confrontation outside an apartment building where Denyakin was banging loudly on a door. Denyakin was shot 11 times. A grand jury declined to bring charges.
The jury recommended a sentence of two and a half years in prison, as Chapman faced up to 10 years. Judge Johnny Morrison will formally sentence Rankin at a later hearing. Morrison denied a request from prosecutors to revoke Rankin’s bail.
During the sentencing hearing later on Thursday afternoon, Morales urged jurors to punish Rankin with “every second and every minute of the 10 years that you are able to give him”.
Broccoletti said Rankin’s felony conviction was punishment enough and urged jurors not to send him to prison“He has lived an exemplary, professional, responsible, civic-minded life all his life,” said Broccoletti. “If you put him in jail for 10 years, does that bring Mr Chapman back to his family?”
Chapman’s cousin Earl Lewis told jurors that Chapman’s death had been “very hard, very painful” on his family. He said Chapman had been hoping to obtain a high school diploma and potentially enter the military.
“He shot him in the head, and it broke my heart,” said Lewis. “He shot him in the chest, and it broke my heart.” Lewis said Chapman’s younger sister, Timesha, had been “totally torn” by his death. Timesha, 18, gave tearful testimony earlier in the trial.
Rankin took the stand for the second time to speak in his own defense. “I think this is a terrible tragedy and I wish it had never happened,” he said, when asked if he had anything to say to the Chapman family. “I can’t begin to fathom how much pain that family is going through after losing a loved one.”
Rankin said he had a wife and a 13-year-old daughter, had been studying at a college with help from the GI bill since losing his job as a police officer, and hoped to work as a mechanical engineer.
Two of Rankin’s former colleagues in the Portsmouth police department also testified in support of him. They described him as a mentor and good person.
The rare trial of a white officer for shooting a young black man played out amid an ongoing nationwide controversy over the use of deadly force by police against African Americans. The case also pitted two senior black prosecutors against Rankin’s two attorneys, who are white.
The prosecution called on two black witnesses, who were ultimately sympathetic to Chapman, while the defense relied on four white construction workers who supported Rankin’s explanation for firing. In a city that is 54% black and 42% white, eight jurors were black and four were white.
Morales, the 32-year-old commonwealth’s attorney, was elected only last year and was trying her first murder case. She faced a formidable opponent in Broccoletti, a criminal lawyer for more than 30 years. Earlier this summer, Broccoletti, 63, won an acquittal for a former sailor charged with murder in nearby Virginia Beach despite the man’s fingerprints being found on trash bags that the body was wrapped in.
Asked why he chose not to try to physically tackle Chapman, Rankin, a US navy veteran who was trained in mixed martial arts, said he “wouldn’t have been able to win an unarmed fight” against the 18-year-old. “This is as dangerous as things get out there,” he said of their confrontation.
He told jurors that after he approached Chapman, the teenager would not remove one of his hands from his pocket. Having apprehended Chapman and placed him over the hood of his patrol car, he said, he shocked the 18-year-old with his Taser when Chapman struggled and tried to get away.
In a video clip recorded by Rankin’s Taser that was played to the court, Chapman could he heard asking: “You’re going to tase me when I didn’t do nothing?”
The Taser was knocked from Rankin’s hand and the pair separated, ending up face to face 6ft apart. “Shoot me, motherfucker, shoot me,” Rankin claimed Chapman said. Then, he said, Chapman “came towards me aggressively” and Rankin opened fire, striking Chapman in the face and chest. “I thought he was coming to kill me,” he said.
Prosecutors pressed Rankin on why he had not instead used pepper spray against Chapman, on why he had left his baton in his car, and why he could not have pressed an emergency button on his radio to call on other officers. “He said it was the ‘end of the world’ button,” Morales told jurors. “Well unfortunately for Mr William Chapman, this was the end of his world.”
Yet the prosecution, who needed to prove that Rankin acted with premeditation, appeared hobbled by Judge Johnny Morrison’s ruling shortly before the trial that jurors could not be shown the gloom-laden mobile messages sent by the officer to colleagues in the hours before the shooting.
In the messages Rankin discussed his hatred for his job, declared that “people are just bad”, said the city of Portsmouth “sucks” and alluded to the condemned biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Morrison also ruled that juvenile criminal records Chapman collected between the ages of 13 and 15, including one assault conviction, could not be used by Rankin’s attorneys in the officer’s defense.
It remains unclear what, if anything, Chapman stole from the Walmart. When killed he was wearing a T-shirt, hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants. A multicolored scarf was found in his backpack along with a laptop that the Guardian understands belonged to a relative. A condom was found in his pocket.
Police documents on the incident indicate that he was seen taking something and then spent time in the store’s bathroom. But the trial focused only on events after Chapman walked out into the parking lot.
(TheGuardian)
