Group assists convicted officer; Foundation examines Chapel murder case

SECTION: EXTRA; Pg. 01J

Group assists convicted officer;
Foundation examines Chapel murder case

BYLINE: Maria Elena Fernandez; STAFF WRITER

BODY:

A 1-year-old nonprofit foundation whose mission is to support police officers charged with breaking the law is investigating the murder and armed robbery conviction of a former Gwinnett police officer.

Eren Chapel, the wife of Michael Chapel, who was convicted in 1995 of murdering and robbing a Sugar Hill woman two years earlier, has asked the National Police Defense Foundation to help her husband prove he is innocent.

After conducting a preliminary investigation, the foundation agreed to assist Chapel, who patrolled Gwinnett streets for eight years before he was arrested.

"A few days after I spoke to Mrs. Chapel, my chief investigator looked into it and called me and said he felt Mr. Chapel was innocent," said Joseph Occhipinti, the foundation's executive director. "He said he also believed he has an idea who is the party that murdered the victim and that crucial evidence was never made known to the jury. He felt a grave injustice had been done to Mr. Chapel.

Chapel was sentenced on Sept. 10, 1995, to two life terms in prison plus five years, the maximum penalty short of the electric chair. Jurors said after the trial that the prosecution proved that Chapel had lured 53- year-old Emogene Thompson to a Peachtree Industrial Boulevard muffler shop to rob her of $ 7,000 and shoot her in the bead.

The jury was also convinced that bloodstains on Chapel's patrol cars matched Thompson's blood, despite a defense expert's claims that DNA tests were uninterpretable.

"The thing that troubles us the most is the forensic examinations," Occhipinti said. "They showed the officer's raincoat that was allegedly full of blood, but the jury was not shown DNA reports. Why didn't they send the raincoat out for forensic testing? The speck of blood in the patrol car is also troubling. It was virtually impossible to run that speck through forensics. It could have been the dry blood of an animal, for all we know.!!

District Attorney Daniel J. Porter, the lead prosecutor in the case, says the foundation's claims that there was not enough blood on the patrol car to conduct a DNA test are "ridiculous."

"With DNA, you either get a result or you don't. That issue was addressed at trial," Porter said. The defense never argued that there was an insufficient sample." Porter said he made the decision not to test the raincoat when he was preparing the case for trial because he wanted the jury to see the blood splatter patterns on the raincoat. The test that could have determined if the blood belonged to Thompson was not available in 1993 when Chapel was arrested, The new test is not 100 percent reliable. "We had the choice to test it in 1995, but I chose not to destroy the raincoat to have a test done that really might not tell me much more," Porter said. "I made the choice to show the raincoat to the jury as it was."

The foundation has started a fund to raise money to conduct a full investigation into Thompson's murder. Chapel is one of 35 cases the foundation has accepted in the past year, Ocahipinti said. The foundation intends to work with Chapel's lawyer, Johnny Moore.

"Dirty cops should go down the drain, be punished and face the music and we wouldn't blink," said the foundation's chief investigator, Boris Korczak. If we have logical and legal reasons to believe that an officer was not treated right and that justice demands were not met, we will react to that."

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