Sunday, March 12, 2017

A "Deal" to Protect the Guilty: Bonneville County's Indecent Proposal to Chris Tapp (IMPORTANT UPDATE, 3/21)



Danny Clark's 14th Century antecedent administers "justice."


See the update below

Idaho Falls resident Christopher Tapp has spent more than two decades behind bars for a murder he did not commit. He was convicted on the basis of a confession extracted from him through psychological torture -- a fact that even the Bonneville County Prosecutor's Office has now grudgingly conceded. Now Bonneville County Prosecutor Danny Clark is reportedly seeking a face-saving plea bargain on the eve of a judicial hearing that would exonerate Tapp.

No physical evidence or eyewitness testimony connected Tapp to the scene of the June 1996 murder of 18-year-old Angie Dodge. Idaho Falls Police Sergeant Jared Fuhriman, who was lead investigator, initially sought to bully Tapp into implicating a friend -- either Jeremy Sargis, whose family had the means to arrange for legal representation, or Ben Hobbs, who had been arrested in Nevada for rape. All three of these young men were excluded as suspects by DNA evidence.
A grieving heroine: Carol Dodge.
Rather than following the evidence to a plausible suspect, Fuhriman and his comrades at the IFPD made do with the suspect that they had, isolating the 20-year-old from his family, and arresting him after his mother tried to contact an attorney.

Polygraph examiner Steven Finn, systematically lying to the victim, convinced Tapp that he was being "untruthful" in denying involvement in the murder, and that unless he offered a "truthful" confession he would face the death penalty. Only by admitting to a "limited" role in a crime committed by others, Tapp was told, could he save his own life.

Following a May 1998 trial replete with perjured testimony by Fuhriman and his colleagues, Tapp was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. At the time, Angie Dodge's mother Carol believed firmly in Tapp's guilt. Several years later, she examined the videotaped interrogations -- and has now become the most passionate advocate for Tapp's exoneration.

There are two separate appeals underway on Tapp's behalf, both of which will be considered on April 25. The legal advocacy group Judges for Justice, which consists of retired judges, FBI investigators, and legal specialists, is preparing to present a detailed and overwhelming case for Tapp's innocence. In doing so, they will place before the court, and the public, an equally voluminous case for decades of criminal misconduct by Fuhriman (who was subsequently elected Mayor of Idaho Falls), his associates in the Idaho Falls Police Department, and the Bonneville County Prosecutor's Office.

Tapp has been relocated to the Bonneville County Jail in Idaho Falls in anticipation of next month's hearing -- which means that Prosecutor Danny Clark and his minions will have more than a month to manipulate him into a plea bargain, which would be a bookend to compliment the process through which he was seduced into a false confession in January 1997.

Twenty years ago, Fuhriman and his comrades wanted to close a murder case to avoid an institutional embarrassment. Now, they want to wring the last full measure of usefulness from their victim by having him accept a deal that will protect them at the cost of his exoneration.


In a letter to Tapp, Judge Michael Heavey advises him that deal that would likely involve an Alford Plea – under which he would assert his innocence while admitting that the prosecutor could prove his guilt in court. This would allow Tapp to be sentenced to the time he has already served, and perhaps a brief term of probation.

“If you accept an Alford deal, then you spent 20+ years in prison for nothing,” Judge Heavey explained. "Fuhriman wins, [former Bonneville DA Kip] Manwaring wins, [assistant prosecutor John] Shindurling wins, Finn wins.... Chris Tapp loses 20 years."
No better than a child molester: Fuhriman.
Anything short of complete exoneration “is a big loss for you,” Heavey advised him. “The prosecutor’s office has done everything they can to keep you in prison for the rest of your life, they are not honorable people. They have the leverage, for about one more month…. Don’t give in, you are an innocent man.”
The wrongful conviction of Christopher Tapp is just one of several cases -- such as the equally bogus double-murder conviction of Lanny Smith, and the utterly bizarre rape conviction of Michael Whiteley -- demonstrating the deeply dysfunctional nature of Bonneville County's criminal "justice" system. The Tapp case, however, poses the most acute risk to the county's political class: It has received national publicity, the victim is still a young man, he has influential advocates (including the murder victim's mother), and his exoneration would lead to a civil rights suit he would easily win.
This explains why the County is desperate to have Tapp sign a deal and seal up the matter before next month's hearing. In the fashion of the inquisitor presiding over William Wallace's torture at the climax of Braveheart, Prosecutor Danny Clark -- like his colleagues, a conservative and pious man -- are urging their victim to acknowledge their divine authority as a condition of being released from his agony.

At one point during the lengthy (and, thankfully, video-recorded) process of manipulating Tapp into a false confession, Sergeant Fuhriman told the victim to look carefully at a religious icon the interrogator displayed as a tie-pin -- a figure of the Angel Moroni, who is revered as a divine messenger in the Mormon faith. Fuhriman explained to Tapp that he was a Mormon Bishop (a position broadly congruent with that of a parish priest) and assured his victim that he would act as his"guardian angel" -- while warning that he was also his "last hope."

Fuhriman new that the DNA evidence at the murder scene had excluded Tapp. The police sergeant was also aware that Tapp's utter lack of familiarity with the specifics of that crime, or the scene where it occurred, meant that he was being maneuvered into a false confession.

None of this mattered to Fuhriman, who -- with his comrades Steven Finn and Ken Brown -- preyed on the vulnerabilities  of their captive, weaknesses that Furhiman had come to know when he was prowling the halls of the junior high school Tapp had attended several years earlier.

Assistant prosecutor John Shindurling, who tried the case in May 1998, was present for an interrogation session during which Tapp's captors systematically fed him details of a crime with which he had nothing to do. Shindurling would later assure the jury that only through direct involvement in that crime could Tapp have known those details. Fuhriman himself would directly perjure himself on the witness stand by making the same claim.

If Danny Clark were any part of a man, he would move to vacate Tapp's conviction, and seek appropriate punishment for Fuhriman and his accomplices in this monumental crime.

In 1880, as her dispossessed people were being starved through the instrumentality of a corrupt Indian agent named James Wilbur, the heroic Sarah Winnemucca confronted that pious fraud. Wilbur, who was given to religious posturing, had accused Winnemucca of "putting the Devil" into the heads of the Paiutes by explaining how the agent had been making himself wealthy by embezzling money and supplies that had been promised to the desperate people over whom he had been given control.

"Mr. Wilbur, you forget that you are a Christian when you can talk so to me," she told him in tones of well-earned, and tightly controlled, contempt. "You are starving my people here.... Everybody in Yakima City knows what you are doing, and hell is full of just such Christians as you are!"

Danny Clark, Jared Fuhriman, and their co-conspirators have implicated themselves in one of the most egregious criminal injustices in the history of Idaho. Everybody who has studied the case knows what they have done, and are doing now -- and hell is full of such sanctimonious frauds as they are.

                      Update: The Bastards of Bonneville County Have Won

"A deal has been reached in the Christopher Tapp case," reports today's Idaho Falls Post-Register. Appellate attorney John Thomas, who will discuss the details of the arrangement today with prosecutor Danny Clark and Judge Alan Stephens in anticipation of a hearing tomorrow, says that Tapp will not admit guilt as part of the deal -- which means, most likely, that the innocent man will take an Alford plea. This would mean immediate release from prison -- but not from the underlying conviction. It would also protect Fuhriman and his accomplices in the kidnapping, torture, and theft of twenty years from Tapp.


The rape conviction will be vacated; the murder charge will remain, and Tapp will still be required to pay "restitution"
for a crime he didn't commit. This means that rather than being compensated by Bonneville County for the theft of his life, Tapp -- a convicted felon with dismal employment prospects -- will probably spend the rest of his life as an indentured servant, subject to wage garnishment and incarceration if he can't make the extortion payments required of him."Chris spent 20 years of his life convicted on a lie, and now he's being released to live the rest of his life as a lie because people who have power can justify this," observes Angie's long-suffering mother, Carol Dodge. "They could care less what happens to Chris. All they cared about was having no liability."

There must be, and will be, accountability for the crimes committed by Fuhriman and his comrades.


 

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast also examines the most recent developments regarding Chris Tapp's wrongful imprisonment:



Be sure to visit the Libertarian Institute -- which will be publishing my forthcoming book on the Christopher Tapp case.






Dum spiro, pugno!


17 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't help wondering while reading the many stories on this matter that Will has put together over the last 18 months or so. Just how many of these bad people in government in Eastern idaho are Mormons? A fact that many people do not understand and Mormons hide is: Mormons are not Christians, they do not believe that Jesus's mother Mary, was a virgin. That simple fact off the top rules out Mormons being Christians along with a long list of other issues that are not biblical in the real Bible but found in the new Mormon add on to the Bible. Which has been edited many times to stay current with the times and peopel's understanding of truth. It's known to many these 3 murders, Miss. Dodge and the older couple were killed by a man that seemingly was likely a CI for the IFPD. The last known address the killer lived at was in KY. A real investigation and not by Idaho LE needs to be done to find out why the wagons were circled to railroad innocent people to cover for a known murder. If the federal government gets involved, bet that the 3 federally elected members of the US House and Senate will rally up the Mormons in congress to shut down any investigation becuase it would show the Mormon church members operatae as a cult with in their own rank and file. Justice will likely never be seen in these 3 murders and the 2 people railroaded for crimes they did not commit.

kirk said...

the worst enemies we can have are those among us. the people featured fit that bill in an extraordinary fashion.

this is 'fairness'? 'justice'? i suppose it depends on which side of the gulag fence one finds oneself.

there are some real sick puppies among us at all levels of 'authority', as opposed to 'leadership', the latter of which has been absent in this nation for a very long time.

Thomas Lowe said...

Anyone taking bet that Chris Tapp "dies" at the hand of an inmate before trial?

Anonymous said...

@7:36

I have considered that many time while reading here. Mormons views non-Mormon Christians as the out group. Utah is an especially strange state where being a non-Mormon Christian places one as a second class citizen. Mormons absolutely look out for their own in Utah. Religious extremists such as Mormons should not be given authority over people they view as unworthy and essentially dirty. It skews their judgment and creates impartiality that is simply unacceptable in positions of authority.

Anonymous said...

Speaking as a non-Mormon, they are people too. There are good decent ones and there are bad ones. Hard to categorize a whole group as good or bad. Shoot, you can say Baptists look out for their own and especially "Independent Fundamentalist Baptists".

All Wrong said...

To the first Anonymous poster, you don't have a damned clue what you're talking about. You said, "A fact that many people do not understand and Mormons hide is: Mormons are not Christians, they do not believe that Jesus's mother Mary, was a virgin." This is almost a truth presented as a complete falsehood. Mormons actually do believe that Mary was a virgin when Christ was born. They believe absolutely in the Immaculate Conception. Your entire "evidence" that they aren't Christians is simply false. Where you've gotten yourself tangled up is that Mormons believe that Joseph and Mary had sex AFTER Christ was born and had more children. In fact, this view isn't contradicted a single time in the Bible.

Another poster commented that Mormons look out for themselves. This is true. Any group that feels persecuted becomes xenophobic and cliquish. The Mormons were persecuted for quite a long time (though they aren't any longer, but still haven't gotten over that view for the most part). That said, the Mormons have a term for what Fuhriman did with the icon of the angel Moroni. They call it unrighteous dominion. He could potentially be excommunicated for this (a fate Mormons, I'm told, take far more seriously than Catholics do). I'm not sure that anyone can look at what he did there, and seriously believe that Fuhriman isn't Scum of the Earth. If I thought he actually had a conscience, I would bet he doesn't look in the mirror very often, but I seriously doubt he's ever been burdened with a conscience.

William N. Grigg said...

There was a time, decades ago, when I committed Doc. & Cov. 121 to what has proven to be a vulnerable memory. All Wrong is entirely correct that conscientious Mormons recognize that Fuhriman committed unrighteous dominion in framing Chris Tapp. Since he eventually profited from that false conviction, he was also guilty of what Mormons call "Priestcraft."


As someone who was born in Burley, and raised as a Mormon in southeast Idaho (I attended High School and college in Rexburg, which at the time was roughly 90 percent LDS), I have intimate and abiding knowledge of the often tribal nature of Mormon-majority communities. I'm confident that in any community where one sect exercises similar demographic dominance the local "justice" system is susceptible to similar distortions: There are some towns of comparable size in Texas, for example, where I would not want to be a Mormon suspected of a hideous crime.

Carol Dodge is a member of the LDS Church. So were nearly all of the other local citizens who crowded the courthouse in Idaho Falls for Chris Tapp's hearing last November, and they were coldly, quietly furious over what had been done by Fuhriman and his comrades.

A few years ago a Mormon-dominated jury acquitted Victor Madrigal and his brother -- two black non-Mormon defendants -- of patently false charges of assaulting the police officers who on the pretext of a noise complaint had invaded Victor's home following his daughter's birthday party (I've written about that case elsewhere). This followed a campaign of vilification in the local media, including a studiously false and defamatory op-ed by Chief McBride.

Mormons, like many other sub-populations, tend to be cliquish, and there are authoritarian aspects of the faith that interact dangerously with political institutions. Fuhriman exemplified this in his cynical invocation of the Angel Moroni, and his subtle assertion of his priesthood status in seducing Tapp into a false confession. The tens of thousands of Bonneville County Mormons who eagerly await Tapp's exoneration are guided by the better angels of that community's nature, as it were.

Anonymous said...

Fair enough, right from the horse's mouth:
The doctrine that really gets other Christians offended on Mary's behalf is our belief in an embodied God. Mormons believe that God "has a body of flesh and bone". (D&C 130:22) You combine that belief with the belief that God is the literal father of Jesus Christ, and after putting two and two together and arriving at sex, other Christians have been morally outraged for decades. (note the wording twice, "other Christians" Mormons are not Christians any more then Muslims are) Which they will all find out the second they meet their Maker. And they will not be like Jesus Chirst with their own planet.

Let's take things to another step and view the whole picture. The Quran came out about 5 hundred years after all the books of the Bible were out. The Quran dances around the Bible and mocks the Bible. The Quran could not have been wrote the way it is without having full understanding of the Bible. The Dark Ages are always blamed on Rome falling. Maybe a very little bit but the Dark Ages were hell on earth in Europe because Islam was on a book burning mission to leave this world with one book, the Quran. After Europe got tired of the Muslam violence the men went to war under the French General "The Hammer" and drove Islame out of Europe into the waiting armies of the Greeks. Who finnished them off. Satan being the founder of Islam, understood that he was not going to be able to destory God's scripture leavinb mankind with one book the Quran. So he thought about that for hundreds of years and likely sent the very same falling angel down to Joe Smith that he did to Mohammad and the Mormon thing and the Book Of Mormons got going. Santan's actions reveal if he could not destory God's scripture then he would add on to it. The Book of Mormons just like the Quran, it too dances around the Bible and mocks it. As we can see above by Mocking God and Virgit Mary. And reguardless of what Mormons say, Islam and Mormonism are pretty much the very same thing. They were both started by Satan.

I wouid like to take a minute here to give a special thanks to, Saint Patrick and the Irish Monks for saving the Holy Bible and mankind's works that have been wrote over many hundreds of years. From the Muslims who would have loved to burn it all to honor Allah, Satan himself.

kirk said...

get well soon, Will. hope there is no residual.

RPN said...

Rest in peace, sweet prince.

Anonymous said...

Not directly related to this story but I wanted to say goodbye to you Will your Christian Kindness and Passion for liberty will be greatly missed. Thank you for always having the time to interact with your fans.
I'm devastated :(

Anonymous said...

Hope you are OK :)

Mj said...

RIP Mr Grigg.

Unknown said...

RIP Will. Though I never met you, your impact on me was profound.

All Wrong said...

Will,

I can't help but notice there hasn't been a new post in a month. I hope all is well, and look forward to reading your next post.

Bob said...

Rest in Peace, Will.

Mack said...

William N. Grigg,

Where are you?