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Thread: Kevin Cooper is a murderer

  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Kevin Cooper is a murderer

    They're back. Those gullible defenders of convicted multiple murderer Kevin Cooper are trying to free Cooper, who was convicted in the brutal 1983 slaying of chiropractors Doug and Peggy Ryen, their ten-year-old daughter Jessica, and 11-year-old house guest Christopher Hughes. Cooper also slit the throat of son Joshua Ryen, 8, and left him for dead. New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, whose work I usually admire, blew it. In "Framed for murder", Kristof suggested that California law enforcement deliberately framed a black man. Kristof urged Gov. Schwarzenegger to commute his capital punishment sentence.

    Attorneys Alan Dershowitz and David R. Rivkin Jr. wrote a similar piece, "A Time for Clemency".

    I've seen Cooper's team of attorneys spin this tale, and they do a fine job -- because they leave out salient facts.


    As I wrote in 2004,

    This is a crime that never should have happened. It occurred after Cooper escaped from a Pennsylvania institution, then raped a teenage girl who interrupted him during a burglary. Cooper fled to California where he was arrested for two more burglaries. In June 1983, Cooper escaped a minimum- security facility, then hid for two days in an empty Chino Hills home that overlooked the Ryens' house. Prosecutors believe Cooper committed the murders so that he could steal their car, which turned up in Long Beach, as he escaped to Mexico.

    After Cooper was convicted, he claimed that he was innocent and asked the courts to conduct DNA testing, which he claimed would exonerate him. If the tests implicated him, Cooper said, he would drop his appeals.

    But the DNA tests nailed Cooper.

    During his 1985 trial, Cooper testified he had never entered the Ryen house. But the DNA tests showed that blood found in the home was his. Cooper had testified that he didn't drive the Ryen car. But investigators found Cooper's DNA on cigarette butts found in the Ryen car. Cooper's DNA was linked to blood found on a T-shirt, along with DNA from Douglas Ryen.

    o Cooper came up with a new story. He did not drop his appeals. He claimed he was framed, as authorities had planted his DNA.

    If you care to know more about his farcical chemical-in-the-DNA argument, read here.

    But if a jury conviction and multiple court decisions against Cooper do not convince you, try this: I talked to two people who had worked on for Cooper's defense and publicly stated that Cooper's planted-DNA charge was bogus.

    Dr. Edward T. Blake boasts that he has been "involved in more post-conviction exonerations than anybody in the world" and has worked for Barry Scheck's The Innocence Project. Cooper's lawyers had hired Blake to prove Cooper's innocence. Instead Blake found, as he wrote in a court document, that the DNA tests "proved" that Cooper was the source of blood at the Ryen home, the source of DNA found on two cigarette butts found in the Ryen car, and the source of blood smears on a T-shirt also containing Doug Ryen's blood.
    Former Pomona cop Paul Ingels worked as a private investigator on the Cooper appeal. As I wrote in another column
    "It proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Kevin Cooper was involved in the murders," Ingels told me over the phone.

    What about the claims that Cooper was framed? "They're just making this stuff up," was Ingels' assessment. As for Cooper's latest set of lawyers, "They're doing everything they can, professional, unprofessional, ethically, unethically," Ingels opined. "The end justifies the means."


    It would be one thing for Cooper's defenders to object to his execution because they oppose the death penalty. But in arguing that he was framed, Cooper's advocates in effect are working to set him free. In describing Cooper as "an intensely gentle and kind man who has found his peace with the system and the injustice that has been done to him," his legal team ignores Cooper's history as a violent repeat offender, who had been institutionalized so many times that he has escaped 12 times, and only got caught after the Ryen murders because a victim went to Santa Barbara authorities to report that Cooper had raped her at knifepoint. But apparently Cooper's groupies don't care.

    Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/...#ixzz1821VhZJW

  2. #2
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Esteban Nunez versus Kevin Cooper

    The Los Angeles Times editorialized Tuesday that outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger should have not have commuted the sentence of Esteban Nunez, but instead should have commuted the sentence of Kevin Cooper.

    There are doubtless worthier inmates. We can think of one off the top of our heads: Kevin Cooper, who remains on death row despite significant doubts raised by a federal judge about the fairness of his murder conviction. Schwarzenegger ignored the considerable evidence in Cooper's favor, meaning that California may soon be guilty of executing an innocent man. Too bad for Cooper that his dad never smoked cigars with the governor.

    Allow me to share an e-mail I received after the Times' earlier pro-Cooper editorial from Rod Leveque, a former reporter from the Daily Bulletin who covered this story. But first, here's a news story about a juror who is furious at the revisionist view of this case.

    video link

    To be clear, I am not a supporter of the state's death penalty system and I'm not here to call for Cooper's execution. However, unlike the LA Times editorial board, my distaste for the current application of capital punishment does not make me blind to the evidence in Cooper's case.

    Anyone who wholeheartedly argues Cooper is innocent is in the same category in my mind as the conspiracy theorist who believes the moon landing was staged and that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy.

    Some inconsistencies can be found in almost any series of events when they are examined obsessively over the course of decades. If someone choose to seize solely upon only those inconsistencies, even the most incontrovertible of facts can start to appear suspect.

    Cooper's case is no different.

    There are aspects of the evidence that are open to question or criticism. While it is healthy that those aspects be examined, any such endeavor must be done without ignoring the strong and compelling evidence that points to Cooper's guilt.

    The pundits who now argue that Cooper is innocent have failed to adhere to such a standard. They have neglected to provide a complete and full accounting of the facts and in some instances have blatantly misrepresented the state of the evidence.

    It's truly a shame they could be so lazy and haphazard on an issue of such great public importance. As a former journalist, I'm saddened by what I've seen.


    The bottom line here: Schwarzenegger did his homework and that's why he turned down Cooper's request years ago

    Posted By: Debra J. Saunders

    Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/...#ixzz1A6VWKeZ2

  3. #3
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Death row inmate asks Gov. Newsom for innocence investigation

    By Kevin Cooper
    San Francisco Chronicle

    On his way out of office, Gov. Jerry Brown ordered limited DNA testing in my capital murder case, but it will take the broader investigation I requested if I’m going to have a meaningful opportunity to prove my innocence.

    Old cases like mine require substantial investigations to prove innocence. Numerous judges, others in the legal community and investigative reporters have concluded that the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department framed me in 1983 for a crime I did not commit — the horrific murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter, Jessica, 10, and of their neighbor, Christopher Hughes, 11. Josh Ryen, 8, survived and said from his emergency room bed the killers were three white men. I am black.

    As Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Fletcher put it in 2009, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department “manipulated and planted evidence in order to convict Cooper. In the course of their investigation, the sheriff’s office personnel discounted, disregarded, and discarded evidence pointing to other killers.” Finding out what happened to that evidence that was planted, disregarded and discounted, and testing what evidence might still exist, is crucial to show I did not commit the “Chino Hills” murders.

    The sheriff’s department has numerous documents never given to my lawyers that will show how exonerating information was ignored and evidence used to convict me was falsified. The documents will show I am innocent, could lead to the real killers and, hopefully, uncover who in the sheriff’s department framed me.

    In my February 2016 clemency petition to Gov. Brown, I asked for an “innocence investigation” and listed the type of documents I need the courts to review: one showing what happened to a blue short-sleeve shirt with blood on it that was found near the crime scene and disappeared in the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department’s custody; and another proving Midge Carroll, warden of the California Institution for Men from which I had escaped, called the sheriff’s department to correct the prosecution’s false claim that crime-scene shoe prints were from shoes sold exclusively to prisons. (The shoes were available at retail stores). Some jurors said this claim helped lead them to find me guilty.

    I want documents relating to testing done on incriminating cigarette butts in the Ryens’ station wagon, and documents from the Scripps Research Institute that initially concluded there were high levels of the blood preservative ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) in a spot of my blood found with Doug Ryen’s blood on a medium-size, tan T-shirt believed to be worn by the killer. I wear a size large.

    The EDTA results, presented in my 2004 habeas hearing, proved the blood was taken from a vial of blood drawn when I was arrested and planted on that shirt. The test result was withdrawn after its import became known, and the judge refused to grant another. The vial later was found to have my blood and the blood of at least one unknown person. I want to see the chain of custody for that tan T-shirt that went missing from the sheriff’s department evidence locker for many months prior to trial.

    Also, I would ask for any documents relating to a sheriff’s department attempt to intimidate a witness into not testifying in my 2004 habeas hearing about seeing three strangers with blood on them in a neighborhood bar near the crime scene the night of the Ryen-Hughes murders. The witness testified anyway.

    Some testing was done, but testing was withheld from tiny blood spots found near a slightly larger blood spot, the only piece of evidence that supposedly linked me to the Ryens’ house. My lawyer believes the large blood spot was planted; a test for EDTA on the larger spot (marked as exhibit A-41) was denied by the judge in 2004.

    We need the test results from the smaller spots, which I believe could exonerate me.

    For unknown reasons, Gov. Brown did not grant five of the DNA tests I requested, tests I believe could show who committed these murders and establish my innocence, including DNA tests of hairs clutched in the victims’ hands as well as the victims’ fingernail scrapings. Why withhold these tests?

    Appellate courts are virtually blocked from considering innocence claims — that’s why it sometimes takes 20 years or more for innocent people to be exonerated. In California, we do not have an innocence commission dedicated to investigating innocence claims. The governor does have the power to order such investigations related to clemency and to obtain documents that have been denied to a person trying to prove his innocence. The judge assigned could oversee the testing of the items denied and conduct a wider investigation of the evidence.

    An editor’s note

    Kevin Cooper’s Feb. 10, 2004, execution was stayed to allow further DNA testing, which was done. His DNA was found on a bloody shirt, and his death sentence reaffirmed. Cooper has filed multiple appeals, all of which have been denied. Questions however still arise. A retired judge now has been assigned to oversee the DNA testing of the four items selected and authorized by Gov. Brown’s executive order.

    The Chronicle solicited an opinion editorial from newly elected San Bernardino District Attorney Jason Anderson. He declined, saying it would be inappropriate as the case is in litigation.

    I now ask Gov. Gavin Newsom to use those powers in my case.

    Kevin Cooper, 61, is a Death Row inmate at San Quentin State Prison. He was convicted in 1985 of four murders that occurred in San Bernardino County.

    https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/...e-13559987.php
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
    1 A Prayer of David. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!

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