The following factual information is of public record, and can be found in any of the petitions filed by Cooper's attorneys, as well as the 2004 dissent in favor of granting a stay of execution by Senior
Judge James Browning in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Most of these lies, whether they are from the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, the San Bernardino County District Attorney's Office, or the State Attorney General’s Office, have been for the most part ignored by every court, except for the En Banc panel of the 9th Circuit which granted Cooper his stay of execution by a 9 to 2 decision and the United States Supreme Court which unanimously ruled against lifting the stay. Yet these lies have not been exposed by the mainstream news media in their one-sided attempt to help the state murder Cooper. So we will tell you those lies ourselves...
All the Lies Uncovered
Officer Stephen Moran of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department lied about never having previously been in the room in the vacant house where Cooper hid after walking away from prison, where Moran claimed to have found a hatchet sheath in plain view on the floor. However, when this room was dusted for fingerprints,
Officer Moran's fingerprints were found inside the room he said he’d hadn’t been in and hadn’t seen the sheath in when he first searched the house.
San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Deputy/Criminalist Daniel Gregonis lied numerous times during Cooper's trial about his testing of A-41, the lone blood drop found in the victims' home and said to match Cooper. He was caught in each of his lies, such as the fact that he used improper testing methods by placing A-41 side-by-side with Cooper's blood sample in order to get a result on A-41. Or that when he initially read the results of his testing of A-41, he found an enzyme that did not match Cooper, so he altered Cooper's profile to reflect the presence of that enzyme, then reporting that A-41 matched Cooper. He then reviewed his work again after learning that A-41 contained a different enzyme than he originally believed, so he again altered his original laboratory notes in an attempt to hide his initial interpretation that had excluded Cooper as a match!
Gregonis also lied about consuming all of A-41 in his testing in 1983. He testified at Cooper's preliminary hearing and trial that he had consumed it all, but two times in following years he found more of A-41. The second time was in August of 1999 when he removed A-41, along with Cooper's saliva and a cigarette butt from the crime lab with the knowledge of Deputy District Attorney John Kochis and kept this evidence out for 24 hours. At this time that Cooper and his legal team were asking for DNA testing on A-41 and other evidence that the state said proved him guilty. It wasn't until after the state agreed to DNA testing that Cooper and his attorneys found out that Gregonis had removed evidence and kept it out for 24 hours without the court's permission or the knowledge of anyone other than the District Attorney.
At a 2003 hearing in State court on the tampering of evidence, Gregonis lied yet again when he said that he never opened or broke the seal on the container that held A-41. We now know that he not only lied about this, but we also have photographic evidence because Gregonis put his initials and the date (8/13/1999) on the label of A-41, which is the protocol of that Sheriff's Department when any seal has been broken and re-sealed. This is how Cooper's DNA was planted on A-41, and how the state got those DNA results in 2001 which implicated Cooper!
The San Bernardino Sheriff's Department lied when it said that two cigarette butts were found in the victims' car and had DNA on them when tested in 2001. This is proved by the fact that one butt which was unrolled and measured 4mm in length in 1983, was re-rolled and measured 7mm in length in 2001 when it was DNA tested. The other butt was yellow in color in 1983 but was white in 2001! Neither of those two cigarette butts were found by Detective Michael Hall in his detailed search of the car or noted in the written report of the search of the victims' car. Yet he did find cigarette butts in the car's ashtray, which disappeared, and other evidence around and near where those two butts were claimed to be found by other officers who searched the car afterwards.
Former District Attorney Dennis Kottmier lied to the jury in Cooper's original trial when the jury was told that Pro-Ked tennis shoes could not have been purchased in any retail stores but could only have been obtained from a prison in California. The prosecution told the jury that the shoes in question were supplied strictly for prison use within the state and unavailable for retail sale. We now know that is not true. We know this because the former Warden of Chino Prison told the Sheriff's department that this was a false theory, that the shoes could in fact be purchased at a retail store. Rather than reveal this very important information to Cooper's trial attorney, both the District Attorney and the Sheriff's Department withheld this information from Cooper. Why? If that Warden had taken the witness stand and testified that those shoes were not solely prison-issued, then the state's theory would have been exposed as a lie.
The state's lying jailhouse informant James Taylor lied about giving
Cooper Pro-Ked tennis shoes. Taylor did recant his trial testimony, but then recanted his recantation under pressure from the state after Cooper received his stay of execution.
District Attorney Kochis lied in 2004 when he testified at a hearing in Federal District Court about whether or not there was a blue shirt, possibly with blood on it, found and turned in to the Sheriff's department shortly after the Ryen murders. Kochis lied and said that no blue shirt existed despite the fact that it was proven that a blue shirt did exist and was turned in by a woman who came to the hearing to testify to that fact. The blue shirt was picked up and logged into evidence by a Deputy Sheriff. There is a police log documenting the blue shirt being picked up and the phone call to the dispatcher reporting this blue shirt. The shirt was found on a different day and in a different location than the t-shirt which was subjected to EDTA testing in 2004.
Deputy Attorney General Holly Wilkins also lied about this shirt. Wilkins also lied about all of the new evidence found by Cooper's attorneys since his stay of execution. These lies include the fact that during Cooper's trial the District Attorney(s) showed the jury institutional sales records of the Pro Keds tennis shoes but did NOT show the jury the retail sales records or the retail sales catalog containing those shoes. That is new evidence!
Joshua Ryen has now given three different stories of what happened on the night of the murders, this could only happen if he was lying and/or under the influence of the prosecution!
San Bernardino County Deputy, or former Deputy, Eckley lied when he testified at Cooper's preliminary hearing and trial that he threw away those bloody coveralls on his own without the knowledge of anyone else because we now know that his supervisor Kenneth Schreckengost approved of their destruction and would not have done so without them first having been tested, especially in such a high profile case as the Ryen-Hughes murders. Those are his words!
Deputy District Attorney, and the District Attorney Kochis and
Kottmier lied to the jury when they said that Cooper is ambidextrous. Those same two district attorneys lied when they said Cooper committed those murders!
Deputy State Attorney General Holly Wilkins and her regime have lied since 2004 about the results of the EDTA and DNA testing on the beige t-shirt, which was ordered by the En Banc panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. She and her supporters were quoted numerous times in different newspapers and other mainstream news media outlets that those tests proved Cooper's guilt. But when questioned by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit in January, 2007, Wilkins admitted that those tests and their results are meaningless and did not prove anything!
If all of these lies had been exposed to the jury, along with the truths that Cooper and his legal team have been saying, do you think Cooper would still have been convicted and sent to death row?