Plain Old Justice

Cops Framed Innocent

Man; Real Killer Free

for 25 Years

By John Peccavi

    Christopher Tapp spent 20 years in an Idaho prison for a June 1996 rape and murder he didn't commit.  Last week, the real killer pleaded guilty to the crimes.

    Brian Dripps told the judge that when he went to the victim's apartment, he had intended to rape her but not kill her.  However, Dripps said, "I was pretty high on alcohol and cocaine."

    Ultimately, DNA evidence linked Dripps to the crime. When confronted with that evidence, Dripps confessed.

    But appallingly, in 1997, after arresting another man for the murder, Idaho Falls police ignored DNA evidence proving his innocence.

    Just 6 days after they arrested 19-year-old Christopher Tapp, the police learned that his DNA did not match that found at the crime scene.  That did not stop them from trying to pin the crime on him.  Nothing stopped them.  Not conscience.  Not law.

    Twenty years later, the Idaho Innocence Project secured Tapp's release from prison.  In July 2019, a court found that he did not commit the crimes and cleared his record.

    Last October, Tapp sued the officers and the city of Idaho Falls.  His lawyers filed a 57-page complaint in federal court, accusing the police of engaging "in a coordinated campaign to wrongfully convict Tapp for Dodge's murder."

    The cops' tactics, as described in the complaint, sound like the methods of a dictatorship's secret police:

In particular, Defendants coercively and abusively interrogated Tapp for about sixty hours, repeatedly threatening him with death, lying to him, and falsely promising him leniency if he told them what they wanted to hear. Defendants also continuously used coercive and  manipulative sham polygraphs on Tapp — not to get to the truth —  but in order to coerce Tapp into giving five distinct, false and fabricated confessions.

    The lawsuit also alleges that the police coerced a teenage girl into falsely testifying that she overheard Tapp confess to the crime.  A drug problem may have made the girl particularly vulnerable to intimidation.  She later admitted that her testimony was false and given only because police threatened her.

    By 2009, so much evidence of Tapp's innocence had surfaced that even the victim's mother was convinced and urging that he be released.  A new DNA testing technique - which ultimately revealed the identity of the true killer - had become available. The Idaho Innocence Project asked the police to send the crime scene specimens to a lab which perform the new analysis, but the police declined.

    Tapp would spend 8 more years in prison before being released.  During that time, his wife died in a car accident.

    Even after release, Tapp had to wait 2 more years before a court found him innocent and cleared his name.

 

Banner photograph of Brian Tapps from Bonneville County (Idaho) jail.  Photo of Angie Dodge from her mother Ms. Carol Dodge.