Justice has not been served
Deborah Saunders's June 28, 2025 column, "Kevin Cooper is guilty," shows a clear disregard for the facts of Cooper's case and the details of the hearing recently completed in the Southern District Court of California. Saunders claims that recent developments confirm Cooper's guilt. As someone who would have witnessed Cooper's execution had the State been permitted to go ahead with it in February 2004, I have followed the case very closely. Perhaps if Saunders did the same, she would present more accurate information.
Saunders's apparent ideological position-that killing poor people of color is the solution to society's problems and a salve to victims' family members-is wrong-headed in the case of all death row inmates, innocent or guilty. But with a case like Cooper's, in which a conviction was produced through law enforcement's repeatedly ignoring, withholding, and destroying exculpatory evidence, it is particularly outrageous.
Cooper was convicted of murdering three members of the Ryen family and their houseguest in 1983 on the basis of a case so weak that one juror commented that Cooper would not have been convicted if there had been one less piece of evidence. Cooper's execution was stayed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, largely on the basis of concerns raised by Senior Circuit Judge James R. Browning in a dissent filed February 8, 2004. This document, which the United States Supreme Court apparently also found compelling, as it unanimously upheld the Ninth Circuit stay, is in the public domain and available online for those who are interested in investigating the facts of the case.
In the months since the Ninth Circuit stayed Cooper's execution, attorneys and investigators working on Cooper's behalf have uncovered additional facts that reflect very badly on the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department (SBSD) and the State's attorneys. These facts, in combination with those available to the Ninth Circuit at the time of the stay, indicate that justice requires, not the execution of Kevin Cooper, but a new trial.
The State's claim-the focus of its opening and closing arguments in the original trial-that a shoe print found at the crime scene could only have come from a prison-issue shoe turns out to be untrue. Cigarette butts containing traces of Cooper's saliva, purportedly found in the Ryen's car after the murders, were, somehow, not recorded in the original search of the vehicle. One such cigarette butt, which according to one expert was consumed in pre-trial testing 20 years ago, reassembled itself in time for new testing. Another cigarette butt grew 75 percent longer in the evidence locker.
Those who have followed Cooper's case know about the bloody coveralls (not Cooper's) that were delivered to the SBSD after the murders and destroyed by the SBSD, untested, before the original trial. More recent investigation has disclosed that at least one ranking officer in the SBSD signed off on their destruction--despite the fact that the officer who destroyed the coveralls testified in court that he had acted independently.
Investigators also discovered that a second bloody shirt (not Cooper's) was found and withheld from defense. Three witnesses have come forward, separately, to report that on the night of the murders, three white men (Cooper is African American) came into a nearby bar spattered with blood. Recent investigation shows that this lead was never investigated.
Saunders writes that Cooper "concocted" a story that he had been framed in the wake of DNA tests conducted in 2001. In fact, long before the tests were completed, Cooper and others close to the case published concerns about tampering when we learned (after the testing agreement was signed) that a State-employed criminalist had "examined" key pieces of evidence for 24 hours in September of 1999 (i.e., before the testing agreement was signed) without notifying the defense.
Saunders claims that recent "simple" tests-one to determine whether evidence had been tampered with and another to determine the origin of hair found in the hands of one of the victims-"bared the lie that Cooper was framed." In fact, these "simple" tests were mishandled by the State, rendering them incomplete and inconclusive. Cooper's attorneys and investigators were never allowed access to the evidence in question, with the result that the State-the entity being examined-was allowed to determine which bits of evidence were tested. When the State's experts didn't like their results-for example, when they discovered high concentrations of EDTA, a chemical used to preserve blood, during evidence testing-they threw them out, claiming that they had been "contaminated".
Since the stay of Cooper's execution, his attorneys have further weakened the State's already tenuous case. Perhaps the presiding judge, the Honorable Marilyn Huff, was showing her frustration with the State's inability to prove its case when she took the unprecedented and legally irrelevant step of having victims' family members give impact statements at the hearing. Whatever her intention, her action demonstrates a clear bias against Cooper and allows her to join a long line of prosecutors who have manipulated victims' grief to buttress weak evidence.
Saunders complains about the cost of testing and the abuse of process. It is the State that has abused the process and caused the testing to be useless. None of the Ninth Circuit's concerns have been adequately addressed, a man's life is still in the balance, and there is abundant evidence that those responsible for the deaths of the Ryens and Chris Hughes are still at large. Given the recent revelation that, in 1995, the state of Missouri executed Larry Griffin for a crime he did not commit, one would think that even pro-death penalty diehards like Saunders would proceed with caution. But I guess it is easier to bay for blood when you ignore the facts.
Elizabeth Terzakis
Campaign to End the Death Penalty
June, 2005