On September 17, 2006, Paula Priamos wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times that was about me, Kevin Cooper, in name only. Previously, Priamos had written for, among others, the New York Times magazine. She seems to be making a name for herself. If her other articles are anything like the one she wrote that is supposed to be about me, she is making a name for herself by calling for the murder of a Black man she knows nothing about for a crime she knows nothing about. You can judge for yourself whether that is an honorable way to build a career.
Priamos doesn't know me, and from what she has written I can tell that she doesn't know or has chosen to ignore the real truth about the reason I am on death row. In doing so, she shows why I am on death row—not because I am guilty, but because people like her refuse to acknowledge the truth.
Priamos states that “the results of new DNA tests confirm what the terrorized community of Chino had known all along, the same story that was told in a San Diego Court room that convicted Cooper—Cooper was the killer.”
What Priamos leaves out of her one-sided story is the fact that the DNA tests were done on an “unknown” stain. The state doesn't know, nor does my attorney, nor do the courts, what kind of stain the state DNA tested in order to get its results, which, in any case, did not fully match me. Only four of the nine DNA numbers matched my DNA. An inconclusive test on an unidentifiable stain does not prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt except that the state is willing to go to great lengths to get me killed.
Priamos also doesn't tell you that the state's EDTA testing expert, Dr. Gary Siuzdak of Scripps in San Diego, found high levels of EDTA on the T-shirt from which the “unknown” stain was taken, indicating that my blood was planted on that T-shirt. And when he and the state learned that the results of his tests supported my defense and not the state's, he withdrew his results, claiming some sort of unproven contamination in his laboratory. To this date, neither he nor the state has proven this alleged contamination.
One thing that Priamos does tell you is that I was accused but not charged with rape. The reason I was not charged is because I did not rape anyone. But Priamos seems to think that it is enough to accuse people of things to make them guilty. Priamos does not seem to think that proof, even proof of innocence, is important.
Priamos says it was “perverse and cruel” for her to turn on the TV February 9, 2025 and see the crowd of people who do not want me to be murdered by the state cheering and celebrating when my execution was halted.
I find it perverse and cruel that now, in the twenty-first century, people like Paula Priamos still support the death penalty, and that certain states within this country still have it and use it.
I find it perverse and cruel that I came within in three hours and forty-two minutes of being murdered by the state for murders I did not commit.
While Priamos wants me to be guilty, along with certain others, including certain people in the mainstream news media, that doesn't mean that I am guilty. And although I am not guilty, and anyone familiar with the whole truth knows why, Paula Priamos wants me dead. Her plea to whoever published her article and to whoever reads her article is for them to want me dead like she does—for others to call for the state to murder a man about whom they know nothing because of a case about which they know—and she knows—nothing.
And if that's not perverse and cruel, I don't know what is.
In Struggle,
Kevin Cooper