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
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