Take Pity on Officer "Safe Space"

Blue Privilege isn't enough: Now cops want to be a "specially protected class."

Makaela Zabael-Gravatt was shot and nearly killed in her own backyard in Meridian, Idaho last September. The man arrested in that attack, Christopher Wirfs, had a violent criminal history. Prior to the attempted murder, Wirfs had spent several weeks stalking and harassing his victim, on multiple occasions explicitly threatening to shoot her.

Zabael-Gravatt twice requested, and was denied, an order of protection against the man who eventually tried to kill her. Media inquiries about those denials were deflected by the Meridian Police Department to the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office, which simply refused to comment on the matter. 

At the time, the Meridian PD and the Ada County DA were preoccupied with a much more urgent matter than protecting a desperate, frightened mother who faced an immediate threat on her life from a violent criminal. They were sheltering a Meridian police officer whose feelings had been hurt by a confrontational Facebook post.

Undefended: Zabael-Gravatt.

In March of last year, the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office requested, and immediately received, a no-contact order banning Meridian resident Matthew Townsend from coming within 100 feet of the paling, timid creature known as Corporal Richard Brockbank of the Meridian PD. Townsend had been arrested by Brockbank a few weeks earlier without legal cause and justification. 

On the eve of his preliminary hearing on a spurious charge of “resisting and obstructing” (he was not under arrest, nor had a charge been made against him, at the time of his supposed resistance), Townsend published a brusque but inoffensive post on Facebook. 

In that cyber-missive, Townsend said, in essence: 

If, in defiance of all reasonable expectations, Officer Brockbank testifies truthfully, the charge against me should be dismissed. If this doesn’t happen, I will exercise my constitutionally protected right to protest the abusive actions of the Meridian municipal government and its agents, including Officer Brockbank.

When he showed up at the hearing the following day, Townsend learned that the Meridian City Prosecutor intended to have him arrested on a felony charge of  “witness intimidation.” District Judge James Cawthon, after examining the Facebook post in question, concluded that Townsend’s statement did not constitute a threat but offered the prosecution a chance to convince him otherwise in a hearing scheduled to take place place eleven days later.

Illegally defying Judge Cawthon’s court order, the Ada County Prosecutor’s office soughtan arrest warrant from another judge on the following day – carefully withholding the fact that Cawthon had already made a finding of fact and had scheduled an adversary proceeding on the matter. Townsend was arrested late that night -- a Friday – and would have spent the weekend in jail had his mother not arranged, on sacrificial terms, to pay his bond.

Overt threats: Wirfs in custody post-shooting.

Unlike Wirfs, who made specific and repeated threats against Mrs. Zabael-Gravatt, Townsend explicitly and repeatedly foreswore violent or criminal behavior and never threatened anybody in any fashion. According to domestic violence counselor Jeannie Strohmeyer, the likeliest explanation for the denial of Zabael-Gravatt’s request for a protective order was that there was no “domestic relationship” between her and the aggressor, and she wasn’t able to cite an incident of physical harm – including “false imprisonment.”

Ironically, while it is certainly true that Townsend was not in a domestic relationship with Officer Brockbank, there was a history of violence between them, specifically false imprisonment. In this case, however, it was the perpetrator of the criminal violence who immediately received an order of protection, owing entirely to his privileged status under what we are supposed to pretend is the law.

In the service of the official fiction that Townsend’s rhetoric victimized a member of the state’s punitive priesthood, Ada County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney James Vogt composed two motions that suppurate sophistry. In one, an objection to a defense motion to dismiss, Vogt insisted that by criticizing Officer Brockbank on Facebook, Townsend had committed an act directly comparable to a cross-burning carried out by the Ku Klux Klan.

 

Vogt’s other exercise in Olympic-caliber dishonesty was an objection to a defense Motion in Limine. Since Townsend’s statement was a form of political dissent, that motion contended, it is protected by the First Amendment and cannot be construed as a criminal act, so it shouldn’t even be entered into evidence. 

Proving that it is possible to simper in print, Vogt wrote that Townsend’s statement that he was prepared to conduct non-violent, legal protests in Brockbank’s neighborhood constituted a “true threat” – owing to the alleged “war on police.” The fact that the post tagged several of the officer’s family members (in addition to scores of other people – including your present correspondent and every media outlet in the Treasure Valley) was artfully misrepresented as a collateral threat to Brockbank’s family. Through the alchemy of Orwellian inversion, Townsend’s acknowledgement that everything government does contains an implied threat of lethal violence was repurposed into a supposed threat to use violence against the State and its agents.

“Given the current political/cultural climate, Mr. Townsend’s message … [serves] as a real and true threat,” oozed Vogt in his objection. “His words are more threatening in an era where [sic] the police are under attack from civilians, battered, and killed in the line of duty.”

Goforth's colleagues at a press conference.

That sample of special pleading was supplemented by a footnote citing four news accounts of police being injured or killed. Two of them described minor injuries suffered by officers in the course of their not-exceptionally-dangerous jobs. Two others were high-profile stories of supposed martyrs in the so-called “war on police”: Lt. Joe Gliniewicz of Fox Lake, Illinois, and Deputy Darren Goforth of Harris County, Texas. Both died as a result of what the public was told were anti-police assassinations, and honored with the familiar Soviet-grade state funeral and saturation media coverage.

Both of them, as it happens, were degenerate frauds.

Gliniewicz committed suicide after embezzling from a Police Explorer unit he led – and inquiring into the possibility of a contract hit on a local official who was investigating the theft. His corruption and long record of abusive behavior (including death threats against a civilian female employee of the department) were well-known by the officers and administrators who presided over a funeral that beatified him as a saintly defender of the public weal. 

After Deputy Goforth was gunned down by a mentally ill man at a gas station last August 28, Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman – speaking without a particle of evidence to sustain his conclusions – blamed the crime on critics of law enforcement: “This rhetoric has gotten out of control, to the point where calculated, cold-blooded assassination of police officers happens.”

Shannon Miles, the thirty-one-year-old African-American man who shot Deputy Goforth fifteen times, has been repeatedly hospitalized for severe mental illness. His derangement is so severe that his defense attorneys cannot hold a coherent conversation with him. The only “rhetoric” that played a role in his eruption of criminal violence would be the voices in his head, not any he may have heard in the media.

Just as importantly, Deputy Goforth wasn’t engaged in official duties when he was fatally shot: He was en route to a motel with his mistress, a “Badge Bunny” who had been used as a pass-around toy by at least three members of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. Goforth found himself in the path of Miles’s lethal derangement because he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong company, with the wrong intentions. He wasn’t upholding the law, but engaged in the ongoing betrayal of his wife and children.

Granted, the details about those cases weren’t widely known when Vogt cited them in his motion. If they had been, the truth wouldn’t have mattered. In its persecution of Matthew Townsend, the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office has proven itself an infinitely self-replenishing Artesian well of falsehoods. They know that the case is without merit, and that if they are able (with the eager help of a deeply prejudiced trial judge) to wring a conviction out of a jury, their victory wouldn’t survive an appeal. Their strategy, from the moment this case began, was the same as that of every other prosecutor in our increasingly Sovietesque system: Extort a plea bargain in order to inflict punishment without winning the case on its merits.

Whatever the disposition of the Matthew Townsend Case, the Fraternal Order of Police is lobbying for legislation that would make it a federal hate crime for a citizen to violate the emotional “safe space” of one of his uniformed overseers.

An FOP-supported bill in Maryland that would likely serve as a model for federal legislation would make resisting arrest a “hate crime” owing to the identity of the supposed victim. State legislatures elsewhere are considering similar measures, and some municipal governments are enacting resolutions endorsing the FOP’s demand to swaddle police officers in federal “specially protected” status.

In a letter to President Obama, Chuck Canterbury, National President of the armed tax-feeders’ union, demanded that “the current Federal hate crimes law be expanded to include law enforcement officers. This call has gone unanswered and our nation’s law enforcement officers continue to die in the streets.”

Head FOP Canterbury lobbying for anti-free speech legislation.

Canterbury, like most in his chosen profession, thrives in a falsehood-rich environment, so his lie of omission – namely, that on-duty violent deaths of police officers were down in 2015 – was predictable, but duly noted for the record nonetheless.

Apparently without giving thought to what it says about the supposed valor of police officers, Canterbury demanded that cops be designated a “specially protected” group who are “hunted and targeted just because of the uniform they wear.”

Canterbury’s tales of insurgent criminals and intimidated cops segued into a demand that “hate speech” be treated as a federal offense.

“Elected officials are quick to console the families of the fallen and praise us for the difficult and dangerous work that we do every day,” sniffles the FOP commissar. “Yet, too many are silent when the hate speech floods the media with calls for violence against police or demands that police stand down and give them” – Canterbury never defines “them,” interestingly – “`room to destroy.’ The violence will not end until the rhetoric does which is why I have called on Congress and your Administration to work with us to address the surge of violence against police by expanding the Federal hate crimes law to protect police.” (Emphasis added.)

The objective here, once again, is to penalize rhetoric as a criminal act against a member of a specially protected class.  Ada County’s depraved, vindictive pursuit of Matthew Townsend demonstrates that this is possible even without the benefit of federal legislation. The “war on cops” is a malignant fiction, but the Matthew Townsend case is one of many portents of a national war by the police against their critics.

                                Video Extra: The Ballad of Corporal Richard Brockbank



This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast examines what happens when the local police become social justice warriors:

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Draft-Nappers Are Back -- And This Time They Want Your Daughter

 

Death lottery: Military slaves are selected in the 1969 draft.

Roughly a year ago, Nampa, Idaho resident Kenndrick Rose was appointed as a member of the local military enslavement soviet. That is an accurate, rather than official, description of the Canyon County Selective Service Board, which would be activated in the increasingly likely event that the Regime reinstates the odious practice of conscription.

Rose inherited his seat on the long-dormant board from his mother, Conchi Morales, who occupied it for twenty years. He has an academic background in computer science but no exceptional qualifications to rule on the merits of a given application for a draft deferment. Neither does anybody else, of course, since no individual or group of people has the right to compel others to serve in the military.  

Although the draft ended in 1973, the apparatus of enslavement was never abolished. Within each of the more than 3,100 counties in the United States lurks a Selective Service Soviet composed of five people who would presume to make decisions regarding life or death, freedom or servitude, for every male 26 or younger residing within that jurisdiction. 

 

Kenndrick Rose (l.) replaces his mother on Canyon County Draft Board.

Seeking to accelerate our descent into unalloyed tyranny, the Pentagon has endorsed the idea that females should be numbered within the human inventory from which the Regime will draw in its next useless, stupid, pointless war. This naturally appeals to the sort of people who believe that any assault on liberty is justified to the extent that it is indiscriminate.

“It may be unpalatable to many to think of their daughters, wives or partners being mobilized,” writes collectivist technocrat Ruth Ben-Ghiat in a sentence that casually assumes that individual human lives are the property of the state to be used as the ruling class sees fit. “In all areas of society, women have embraced the principle that equal rights brings [sic] with it equal duties. In the workplace and beyond, we share responsibilities with men. Selective Service registration should be no different.”

That argument makes perfect sense, once it is rotated one hundred and eighty degrees: Since men, as human beings, are owners of their lives and should not be forced to submit to draft registration, neither should women. That principle is unintelligible to collectivists, who define society as an appendage of the state. This is true not only  of left-collectivists, but of conservative militarists, as well.

Four decades ago, one of the most insistent arguments offered by opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment was that it would create the legal basis for making women subject to the draft. That prospect inspired horror and outrage during the age of Reagan. When the subject was addressed to Reagan’s would-be heirs at the most recent presidential pander-pageant (events of that kind are usually called “debates”), only Senator Ted Cruz expressed disapproval. This was because he considers it to be “immoral” to “draft our daughters to forcibly bring them into the military and put them in close combat” – not because he objects to the practice of military enslavement on principle. Having expressed an intention to conduct carpet-bombing – or perhaps even nuking -- various Middle Eastern countries, Cruz clearly harbors ambitions the fulfillment of which would require an expansion of the military that current recruitment rates would not yield.

Left-collectivists love social engineering; right-collectivists adore the military. Conscripting women would be the natural synthesis of this depraved dialectic.

In July 1863, amid riots that greeted the Lincoln regime’s imposition of conscription, the New York Times – ever and always the voice of the ruling class – published a remarkable editorial that offered a commendably candid expression of the evil premises at the heart of the policy.

“It is a national blessing that the conscription has been imposed,” decreed the paper’s editorial collective. “It is a matter of prime concern that it should now be settled, once and for all, whether this government is or is not strong enough to compel military service in its defense.” (Emphasis added.)

The defining deceit of those who support the murderous fiction called “government” is that this institution exists to protect the rights and property of the people. The truth is precisely the reverse: The perspective of those who act in the name of the state is that the people exist to protect the government.

Prior to 1863, continued the Times editorial, “the popular mind had scarcely bethought itself for a moment that the power of an unlimited conscription was … one of the living powers of the government in time of war. The general notion was that conscription was a feature that belonged exclusively to despotic governments.”

So alien was the idea of a military draft to the Founders, and those of their generation (Jefferson referred to it as “the last of all oppressions”) that Congress refused a proposed conscription bill during the War of 1812 – even after British soldiers had burned the White House and the US Treasury had practically run dry. The proposed draft was among the grievances cited by the Hartford Convention of New England states considering secession from the union. 

Lincoln’s war to re-conquer the independent Confederate States dispelled the last vestiges of that innately American hostility toward despotic power, as the Times pointed out. The sacred cause of protecting the central government, the paper opined, meant that “not only the property, but the personal military service of every able-bodied citizen is at the command of the national authority, constitutionally exercised.” 

In this context, the modifier “constitutionally” means, in practice, “exercised by people occupying positions listed in the document, not exercised in a fashion compatible with the provisions contained therein.” The printed words in the U.S. Constitution are meaningless; the actual constitution could be best summarized in the Latin phrase, imperii salus, suprema lex, as elaborated by the Times:

 

“The government is the people’s government…. When it is once understood that our national authority has the right under the Constitution to every dollar and every right arm in the country for its protection, and that the great people recognize and stand by that right, thenceforward, for all time to come, the Republic will command a respect, both at home and abroad, far beyond any ever accorded to it before.” (Emphasis added.)

Once the Regime establishes the principle that it can steal the lives of its subjects, every purported constitutional guarantee of liberty is nullified.

As America succumbed to the mass psychosis that led to U.S. involvement in World War I, Progressive-era legal scholar John Henry Wigmore, who remains one of the most influential American jurists, explained that in wartime, “all principles of normal internal order may be suspended. As property may be taken and corporal service may be conscripted, so liberty of speech may be limited or suppressed, so far as deemed needful for the successful conduct of the war.” 

The 1919 Schenk v. United States ruling, which gave birth to the deathless and endlessly harmful cliché that “Shouting `Fire!’ in a crowded theater” is not free speech, dealt with a pamphlet that made a constitutional argument against conscription. Dissemination of that document, according to the Feds, constituted a violation of the Espionage Act – and the High Court ratified the prosecution and conviction of the anti-war agitators who had published and circulated it. 

“The document in question, upon its first printed side, recited the first section of the Thirteenth Amendment, said that the idea embodied in it was violated by the Conscription Act, and that a conscript is little better than a convict,” wrote Justice Holmes, limning the tract’s seditious details with obvious disgust. “In impassioned language, it intimated that conscription was despotism in its worst form, and a monstrous wrong against humanity in the interest of Wall Street’s chosen few. It said `Do not submit to intimidation,’ but in form, at least, confined itself to peaceful measures such as a petition for the repeal of the act.”

“ The other and later printed side of the sheet was headed `Assert Your Rights,’” continued Holmes. “It stated reasons for alleging that anyone violated the Constitution when he refused to recognize `your right to assert your opposition to the draft’ and went on [to say that] `If you do not assert and support your rights, you are helping to deny or disparage rights which it is the solemn duty of all citizens and residents of the United States to retain.’”

Petitioning the government in defense of individual rights is advertised as a core function of the First Amendment, a provision Holmes dismissed with a rhetorical wave of the hand:

“When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right. It seems to be admitted that, if an actual obstruction of the recruiting service were proved, liability for words that produced that effect might be enforced.”

Writing on behalf of the Court, Holmes went on to insist that no actual “obstruction” of the draft would be necessary, since publication or public utterance of criticism for the policy is evidence of a “conspiracy to obstruct” the practice of military servitude. 

All of this is justified, from the perspective for which Holmes wrote, by wartime necessity. As it happens, the U.S. government is rarely at peace, and has been on a de facto war footing since 1947. Critics of conscription are fed the deceptive assurance that Congress would face insurmountable political resistance. That claim is difficult to sustain in light of the torpid public reaction to the once-unthinkable prospect of conscripting women.

Furthermore, it isn’t necessary for the draft to be formally revived in order for resisters to face prosecution. Fifteen young men who refused to register for military slavery have been convicted of that “offense” in federal court since the Selective Service was reactivated in 1980. Nine of them spent time in prison. All of them were branded as felons for the supposed crime of asserting their self-ownership.

The implacably predatory nature of the Selective Service System played a critical role in the transformation of Claude Dallas from a polite, eccentric cowboy into an outlaw. 

Dallas, who was raised in Ohio but considered himself both temporally and geographically displaced, was working in a cattle camp in Nevada’s Paradise Valley when he was ambushed by two FBI undercover agents and the local sheriff in October 1973. A few months earlier, a federal grand jury had secretly indicted Dallas for the supposed crime of refusing induction into the Armed Services three years earlier. 

Both the Vietnam War and the draft had ended nearly a year before Dallas was arrested. This mattered not at all to the officials who conducted a nation-wide manhunt for the fugitive would-be slave, staged an undercover operation to find him, and then delivered him – shackled in leg-irons – to Mt. Gilead, Ohio, where he was thrown into a drunk tank and became the focus of opportunistic abuse by sheriff’s deputies. 

Dallas wasn’t afraid to fight, or unable to do so. His prowess with firearms was well-known to the man-stealers who carefully orchestrated his abduction. 

The local magistrate who examined the the federal indictment (which was issued a month after the draft was discontinued) found that the Mt. Gilead Draft Board – yes, those panels are considered to be judicial bodies -- had made some critical procedural errors, and dismissed the case. 

As he was stuffed onto a bus to take him back to Nevada, Dallas was informed by one of his abductors that he would never be free.  

 

“I’m gonna get you, Dallas – even if it’s just for tax evasion,” the FBI agent hissed in the cowboy’s ear as his shackles were removed.  

Not surprisingly, the experience of being assaulted, abducted, publicly humiliated, caged, and then threatened by the Feds catalyzed a change in Dallas’s disposition.

 

“They wouldn’t have took me like this if they hadn’t got the drop on me,” Dallas told to friends in the Paradise Valley bunkhouse. According to Jack Olsen in his book Give a Boy a Gun, Dallas “was publicly heard to swear that no one would ever outdraw him again – no one. One of his closest friends asked how he felt about the draft and the Vietnam War. He said that he would fight for his country if he were asked in a nice way, but `nobody’s gonna order me around.'” 

Living under the shadow of a government that sought to put him back into a cage, Dallas became a hermit, and then a poacher. This led, a little more than seven years later, to a confrontation with two game wardens -- – Bill Pogue, a “badge-heavy” former Winnemucca, Nevada police chief, and Conley Elms – who had located Dallas’s campsite about three miles on the Idaho side of the Nevada border in Owyhee County.

Pogue and Elms were determined to take Dallas in for possession of illegal hides and venison. Dallas was determined never again to feel handcuffs biting into his wrists. All three of them went for their guns. Dallas was the only one left standing.
 

“Nobody has the right to come into my camp and violate my rights,” Dallas told his friend Jim Stevens, the only eyewitness to the shootout. “In my mind it’s justifiable homicide.” The Owyhee County jury who later convicted Dallas of manslaughter would have accepted his argument if he had tried to render aid to the fallen officers, rather than “mercy-killing” each of them with a .22 round to the back of the skull. 

Claude Dallas is hardly a saintly figure, but he only became a killer after being cornered by gun-wielding government employees who most likely would have found some way to validate the FBI agent’s threat: The Federal Government would find some way to “get him” as punishment for avoiding the draft, no matter how trivial the violation may have been.

For killing two armed men who were prepared to kill him, Dallas served twenty-three years in prison. If he had submitted to conscription and wound up killing two dozen Vietnamese, Dallas would have been given a medal. This makes perfect sense to the kind of people who believe that government “authority” can transmute slavery into “service,” and murder into heroism.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Stolen Lives, Protected Criminals: The Wrongful Imprisonment of Christopher Tapp

This man belongs in prison: Former IFPD Detective, and I.F. Mayor, Fuhriman.

 

There are abundant reasons to be grateful that we do not live under the Old Testament “lex talonis” legal covenant, and one compelling reason to lament that this is so: Under the system of justice described in the Book of Deuteronomy, a lying police officer and corrupt prosecutor who falsely convicted an innocent man would be required to suffer the punishment intended for their victim.

Under that legal principle, former Idaho Falls Police Detective Jared Fuhriman and former Bonneville County District Attorney Kip Manwaring would be serving a sentence of 30 years to life for the wrongful murder conviction of Christopher Conley Tapp.

Former DA Manwaring.

 

Angie Dodge was murdered in her Idaho Falls apartment on or about June 13, 1996. The perpetrator entered the apartment without forcing entry, and was strong enough to overcome the determined resistance of an athletic woman who was six feet tall and weighed roughly 180 pounds (the victim’s body displayed “defensive wounds”). Although there was semen deposited on the victim’s upper torso, a post-mortem determined that she had not been raped. The crime scene evidence made it clear that this abhorrent act was carried out by a lone perpetrator. That evidence also excludes Christopher Tapp as a legitimate suspect. 

Tapp has been imprisoned for nineteen years -- nearly half his life -- for a murder he didn't commit, after being forced to confess through a month-long ordeal of protracted interrogation involving of threats and psychological duress. This is the conclusion of a non-profit activist organization called "Judges for Justice," a group of retired judges and criminal investigators who review suspected cases of wrongful conviction.

A newly released video documentary by the group, which is available on YouTube, analyzes the methods used by Idaho Falls Police Detective Jared Furhiman and his colleagues to suborn Tapp into ratifying false accusations against a friend -- and then to make a false confession. Somber in tone and devoid of sensationalism, the Judges for Justice documentary deserves at least as much attention as the Netflix investigative series “Making a Murderer.”

 

Tapp lived in the same neighborhood as the victim and considered her a friend. He also knew Ben Hobbs, the Idaho Falls resident selected by the IFPD as a suspect after he was arrested in Ely, Nevada for raping a woman at knife-point. When he was brought in for questioning, Tapp was told that he was being treated as a witness against Ben. However, a detailed critique by Judges for Justice investigator Gregg McCrary, a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent, points out that Detective Fuhriman and his associates treated him as a suspect from the very beginning. 

Tapp during an appeal hearing.

 

“Tapp was the subject of nine interrogations over three and a half weeks, for over 20 hours,” notes McCrary. “Detectives refused to accept Tapp’s repeated denials of involvement, arresting and jailing him when he did not implicate Hobbs, then releasing him when he did so.”

The method used to interrogate Tapp, commonly called the “Reid Technique,” has frequently been used to manipulate suspects into false confessions. Even so, Joseph Buckley, President of the John E. Reid & Associates consulting firm, emphasizes that interrogators taught to use this method are advised that “they should not try to talk a suspect into believing that they committed the crime.”

This is precisely what the IFPD investigators did under the direction of Detective Fuhriman. McCrary observes that Fuhriman and his comrades ran the table of methods expressly prohibited by the Reid Technique, such as “threatening inevitable consequences”; “making a promise of leniency in return for the confession”; “denying a subject their rights”; and “conducting an excessively long interrogation.” The only evidence against Tapp is the confession he has since recanted. An abundance of physical evidence was deposited by the killer at the scene, including semen, hair, fingerprints, and skin cells. None of it offers a match to Tapp. 

Carol Dodge, the mother of the murder victim, has spent decades trying to learn the truth about what happened to her daughter and has become one of Tapp’s most outspoken advocates – primarily because she wants investigators to identify and prosecute the man who actually committed the crime. On her own initiative and at her own expense, Mrs. Dodge collected and reviewed scores of hours of video-recorded interrogations, which left her convinced that Tapp had been railroaded -- and also left her mortified by the knowledge that her daughter's killer was left at large.

"I am at the mercy of the city of Idaho Falls and the prosecution to find the one and only killer of my daughter," Mrs. Dodge despairingly observes. "They need to do their job."

Tapp became entangled in the investigation not only because he was a friend of the man originally suspected of the murder, Ben Hobbs, but also because he was known to lead investigator Detective Fuhriman. Before his promotion Fuhriman was a resource officer and DARE instructor at Idaho Falls High School, where he had become acquainted with his future victim.

On January 6, 1997 – six months after Dodge was murdered, Hobbs was arrested for rape in Ely, Nevada. Once the Idaho Falls Police – who had not been able to make any headway on the case -- settled on Hobbs as a suspect, notes a report compiled by Judges for Justice, “they stopped looking for suspects and worked to extract a confession.” 

 

They did this despite the fact that they had known about a much better suspect since the previous September.

At about 3:00 a.m. on June 13, 1996, Angie Dodge’s neighbor John Browning received a visit from a fellow tenant of the Woodruff Apartments. In a subsequent affidavit Browning recounted that the visitor, who asked for a cigarette, “had blood on his clothes, scratches on his face and a rug burn on his chin…. I remember seeing tape on his wrists.” Browning’s ex-wife Gentri, who was never interviewed by police investigators, later identified the man in a photograph taken in 1988. 

 

The man in that photograph is not Chris Tapp.

Browning himself was approached at work by a plainclothes police officer in September 1996, and provided a detailed description of the blood-spattered visitor. This included the fact that he was often seen riding a black motorcycle with speakers attached by bungee cords. Once again, Chris Tapp is not a match for this description.

Police reports frequently mentioned a convicted rapist named Jeffrey Lynn Smith, who did match the visitor’s description. For reasons never explained, the IFPD decided not to pursue that lead. For reasons that are eminently explicable and legally indefensible, the Bonneville County DA’s Office withheld those facts from Tapp’s defense attorney, thereby committing a Brady violation that by itself is sufficient to vacate the conviction – or at least dictate a new trial. 

 

After Hobbs was arrested, he adamantly insisted that he had nothing to do with the killing of Angie Dodge. When the available physical evidence eliminated Hobbs as a suspect, the IFPD's theory expanded to include a second man named Jeremy Sargis, and eventually a third, never-identified man. Fuhriman sought to elicit from Tapp testimony that could be used against Hobbs and Sturgis, feeding him details about the murder and the crime scene and often misrepresenting the evidence. After DNA tests disqualified both Hobbs and Sargis, Fuhriman – no doubt acting under pressure from his superiors and, most likely, his own ego – framed Tapp for the crime.

Tapp had been carefully beguiled into believing that he was helping the police learn the identity of the degenerate wretch who had murdered a friend. He was shocked and disoriented to learn that another friend was the perpetrator – and then terrified to discover that he could find himself in prison, or facing execution, for the crime unless he perjured himself. What he never realized until far too late was that his captors were playing a cynical game of musical chairs, and that he was the one left standing when the music stopped. 

 

At first, Tapp was offered an immunity agreement in exchange for testifying against Hobbs. The prosecutor revoked that agreement after the story Fuhriman had fed to Tapp was discredited by physical evidence. Tapp continued to deny any knowledge of, or involvement in, the murder, and Fuhriman continued to escalate his demands that Tapp ratify various theories of the case. 

 

During the initial sessions, Tapp was interrogated without the benefit of an attorney. After his mother intervened to obtain an attorney for him, the police arrested Tapp on a charge of "accessory to a felony" -- on the basis of his agreement with a false narrative they had dictated to him. Tapp was held for six days, then interrogated until he broke and provided them with the spurious confession they sought in the belief that this was the only way he could avoid the gas chamber. At one point, as the emotionally battered suspect refused to admit to a crime he didn’t commit. Fuhriman – a prominent leader in the lay priesthood of the Mormon Church – invoked the concept of religious absolution, insisting that Tapp would receive some kind of divine favor if he agreed with the false narrative being imposed on him.

“This is a false confession,” summarized McCrary of Judges for Justice in a 2014 report to the Bonneville County Prosecutor’s Office. Fuhriman and his colleagues “manipulated Mr. Tapp through a series of explicit threats and promises, used false evidence ploys, asked a host of leading questions and continually contaminated the interrogation by disclosing nonpublic details of the crime and crime scene while naming suspects speculatively, all of which was improper…. These detectives never attempted to validate Mr. Tapp’s repeated denials. The detectives had prematurely moved from an evidence-based investigation to a suspect based investigation, with only mere speculation linking their favored suspects to the crime and crime scene.”

Rather than pursuing leads in the search of the truth, Fuhriman and his cohorts, who displayed “tunnel vision, confirmation bias, group think, organization momentum, and belief perseverance,” are guilty of what Judges for Justice describes as “noble cause corruption” – the belief that the virtuous end of punishing a hideous crime justified the use of dishonest and criminal means.

Last April, the Bonneville County Public Defender’s Office filed a petition for post-conviction relief, on Tapp’s behalf, citing the fact that DNA evidence collected at the scene excludes Tapp as a suspect. Three years earlier, a previous petition was denied by Idaho Seventh District Judge Joel Tingey, who claimed that Tapp hadn’t proven that he was in police custody at the time he made the indisputably false confession. 

Convenient timing: Mayor Fuhriman announces his "memory" disorder.

 Significantly, Jared Fuhriman, who had twice been elected Mayor of Idaho Falls by the time Tapp filed his first petition for relief, wasn’t able to offer testimony on the basis of the unexpected but conveniently timed appearance of a “memory disorder.” Although he clearly harbored political aspirations beyond Idaho Falls City Hall, Fuhriman declined to run for a second term after NBC Dateline broadcast a program devoted to the Chris Tapp case, and has apparently retired from public life.

Judges for Justice has slammed the Idaho appellate court system for its refusal to reconsider the case, a decision that appears to be motivated by a desire to protect the personal and institutional reputations of those responsible for sending an innocent man to prison – and allowing a murderer to go free.

Tapp will not be eligible for parole until 2027.  One condition of parole would be that he admit to the crime – and pass a polygraph examination certifying that his confession is sincere. Ironically, Tapp was maneuvered into a false confession with the help of IFPD Detective Steve Finn, a polygraph examiner who conspired (no other word is suitable) with Fuhriman to manipulate the suspect into falsely incriminating himself. 

 

One detail in the story concocted by Fuhriman that betrays its origins in his imagination is the claim (noted in McCrary’s report) that “Hobbs, tap and UNSUB were under the influence of a significant amount of marijuana” at the time they supposedly gang-raped and murdered their victim. Fuhriman, it will be recalled, was a DARE instructor paid to peddle “Reefer Madness”-grade prohibitionist propaganda. 

 

It is doubtful that even Harry Anslinger, the deranged and race-obsessed grandfather of the Drug War, would credit the idea that young men blitzed on weed would rape, strangle, and mutilate a young woman. In fact, by the 1950s Anslinger’s chief objection to marijuana was that consuming it would leave young men too torpid and pacifistic to take up arms against the Commies. Fuhriman’s view of marijuana as a Satanic Communist Demon Weed capable of turning upright young men into murderous sex fiends was about seventy years behind the prohibitionist curve, but it still played well in Puritanical southeastern Idaho. 

 

The methods used by Jared Fuhriman and his comrades to extort the false confession from Tapp were broadly congruent with those employed by child sex predators to groom and exploit their victims. Although no physical violation was involved, the Idaho Falls Police Department gang-raped Chris Tapp, which is an on-going offense while that innocent man remains in prison and a protected murderer -- assuming he hasn't paid his debt to nature -- continues to walk free.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast also examines the wrongful conviction of Christopher Tapp:

Dum spiro, pugno!