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BACKGROUND ON
KEVIN COOPER'S CASE

WRITINGS FROM
DEATH ROW

EVENTS AND UPDATES

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WHO IS KEVIN COOPER?

Kevin Cooper is on death row at San Quentin State Prison. He was scheduled to be executed at 12:01 a.m. on February 10th, 2004. The execution was halted just hours before, after a battle inside and outside the courtroom to prove his innocence. Kevin himself has always been at the forefront of the struggle not only for truth and justice in his case, but against the death penalty system as a whole. This page contains background information on his case and links to groups fighting the death penalty in California and across the U.S. Kevin is a prolific writer, and his essays are also posted here. Read the facts, find out about more death penalty issues, and get involved!!

Printable Factsheet (PDF)
Legal Update (PDF)

The International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) list Kevin as one of the "prominent victims of these government frame-ups" in a resolution against Racist Oppression and the Death Penalty, passed in 2009.

KEVIN COOPER UPDATE

Kevin Cooper, an innocent man on death row, was denied by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on May 11th. His case will next go to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kevin got support from a substantial minority of justices who voted against the denial. Judge Fletcher, who wrote the dissenting opinion, began his dissent: "The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." The dissent describes in detail the case for Kevin's innocence, the tampering, planting, and mishandling of evidence, police and prosecution misconduct, and the constitutional violations. 

At the same time, a public comment period on the lethal injection process for the state of California has begun, and will end June 30th with a public hearing in Sacramento. The wrangling over the issue of lethal injection has stopped the State from executing anyone. If the courts approve the latest method, executions will restart.

STATEMENT FROM KEVIN COOPER

"I, Kevin Cooper, am asking you to get involved in a life and death struggle. This struggle is not just about me. Even though the  Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just denied my petition, if you read the 101 page dissent you will see that many of the judges acknowledged my innocence. They write that the evidence was tampered with, and that my constitutional rights were violated. I have been fighting, and will continue to fight. And I am asking you to fight, too. 

You best believe that this state is now working very, very hard to have the legal obstacles to starting executions again removed. By the time this brief moratorium is over, there may be close to 20 inmates in here without any appeals left. Just think how many more men, and maybe women, will have their appeals denied by the court, and will be sitting here waiting to be tortured and murdered by this state?! This state will become ‘Texas West’ if they restart this killing machine in California! So what are we going to do about it? Are we ready for it, because it’s coming?!" 

 

LINKS

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent: http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf

OLDER UPDATES

Statement from Kevin Cooper
 
On December 4, 2007, a 3-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal denied my successive petition for relief. While this is a disappointment, it was not unexpected. This is because the two main judges, Rymer & Gould, have been deciding against me since the year 2000. They denied all of my other petitions, including my request for a stay of execution the year 2004.
 
The third judge, McKeown, also agreed with the majority decision. However, in reading her concurrent opinion, it reads like a dissent. She speaks the truth and deals with issues that both Rymer and Gould ignore. While she does not deal with all of the issues, she deals with enough of them to let you know that I have told the truth about this case and what is being done to me. She deals with the tampering of evidence and many other issues that I have been trying to expose. She tells the truth about the injustices that have happened to me, that I have been trying to tell. She deals with injustices that the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and others who have spoken out for me have been trying to expose.
 
For example, she writes concerning the 2001 DNA tests on the blood sample ("A-41") that the state said came from me and was found in the victim's home. The DNA tests on that piece of evidence are a fraud, because that blood sample was completely consumed in pre-trial tests in 1983/1984. This is what McKeown sites form a California Supreme Court decision in my case in 1991. How could something that was completely consumed in pre-trial tests be DNA tested in 2001?
 
However, she says, the issues are procedurally barred under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. She says that while these issues need to be examined, and while the state  cannot prove that I am guilty, because the issues are procedurally barred my conviction and death sentence are upheld. How is that justice? Is the truth procedurally barred? I guess those in power say that it is. But I think most people will agree with me that truth and justice should never be "procedurally barred."
 
Please read Justice McKeown's 15 page separate opinion from the 12/04/07 decision. [The first is the majority opinion, followed by McKeown's concurrent opinion.] See the CEDP statement for where you can read the opinion. If you read it, you will see that there are many other things that must be exposed. I am innocent of the murders that I was convicted of. McKeown's opinions, like Justice Browning's 2004 dissent, tells the truths that the other judges ignore.
 
I thank all of you for your continued help and support. I want for you to know that I will continue this fight as long as I live, and I truly hope that you will continue fighting with me!
 
In Struggle & Solidarity,
 
Kevin Cooper

Listen to an interview with Kevin and his attorney: Go to the KPFA Flashpoints archives and scroll down to the December 8th show.

"The Merits"

by Kevin Cooper

It is my understanding that on [January 9th, 2007], a three-Judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will have Oral Arguments in my case, and do so "on the Merits!"

If this is truly the case, then it will be the very first time in over 20 years, or since I was first arrested in 1983, that this will happen.

All I have ever asked, and all that I have a right to ask, is that the whole truth be told about this case. So far, despite what the state claims, this has never happened. I am not asking for just my side to be told in this, and I most definitely don't want just the state's one-sided side to be told as it has been with the help of the mainstream news media.

I want both sides to be told, I want the truth to be told! I want this case to truly be heard "on the Merits" this around! So far the state has lied about evidence, destroyed evidence, withheld evidence, ignored evidence, tampered with evidence, contaminated evidence, used a lying jailhouse snitch/informant and even allowed the D.A. who helped convict me to lie in Federal District Court when he was under oath!

Yet despite all of this, the attorneys who are representing me are, for the very first time, about to be heard "on the Merits!" Maybe there is justice after all.

In Struggle From Death Row

At San Quentin Prison,

Kevin Cooper

 

UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE LA TIMES

The Walls That Racism Built
By Elizabeth Terzakis
Elizabeth Terzakis edited David Zirin’s What’s My Name, Fool?

September 30, 2006

I was 18 when Kevin Cooper escaped from the minimum security California Institution for Men (CIM) where he was serving time for a nonviolent offense. I was working the early shift at a roadside diner, having just graduated from an integrated high school in New York, 3000 miles away from 12-year-old Paula Priamos’s (Prisons without walls, Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, September 17, 2006) home near the CIM in southern California.

Sometimes, in the search for justice, distance can be very important.

The year that Cooper escaped, 1983, was some ten years before the Brookings Institution’s John Dilulio used the term “superpredator” to describe minority youth, but nevertheless “tough on crime” rhetoric was rampant. I remember my senior year in high school being marked by racial tension. School authorities seemed anxious to read every instance of adolescent conflict as prelude to a “race riot.”

This was the national mood when Cooper, who is African American, escaped, when Douglas, Peggy, and Jessica Ryen and their houseguest Chris Hughes were murdered, and when 8-year-old Josh Ryen had his throat cut but miraculously survived.

Perhaps this mood had something to do with the fact that when the San Bernardino Sheriffs Department found out that Cooper had escaped, they dropped all other leads and went looking for him. There were more likely suspects—such as the three men that Josh Ryen initially identified, or the three blood-spattered men spotted in a bar near the crime scene that night, or the three men noted in a police log as driving a car that matched the Ryen’s stolen station wagon. This mood was expressed more sharply at Cooper’s preliminary hearing where, outside the courthouse, members of the American Nazi Party carried signs demanding that the State “Fry the N*gger” and “Kill the African Troglodyte.”

I mention this because when I read Priamos’s essay two things occurred to me. One is that she is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is understandable given her youthful proximity to such a horrible murder. The other is that the particular shape her trauma has taken—the desire for Kevin Cooper’s death—is a product of racism.

Long before I met Kevin Cooper, I knew that he could not have committed the crime for which he was convicted. I knew, not because of some faith in his moral fiber—I hadn’t met him—but because simple common sense told me that one man could not kill four people and mortally wound a fifth using a knife and a hatchet unless they stood still for it.

Every time I dug deeper into the case, my initial suspicions were confirmed. Doug Ryen was an ex-Marine, and Peggy Ryen was a horse trainer. There were loaded guns in the house. I believe Mary Howell, Peggy Ryen’s mother, who said in a TV special decades after the crime that the people in her family were fighters. Their murders were clearly the work of more than one person. To believe otherwise is to accept the racist idea that African Americans are super-powerful monsters.

Priamos bemoans the fact that Cooper’s execution was stayed, despite DNA tests—the first post-conviction DNA tests ever granted—that implicated him in the crime. She rejects the idea that this implication occurred because the evidence was tampered with, even though the State’s criminalist was found to have taken the evidence out of its locker for 24 hours to “examine it” without the prior consent or even knowledge of the defense. She rejects the idea that evidence could have been tampered with even though the Sheriff’s department is known to have destroyed a pair of bloody coveralls brought to them by a woman who thought her boyfriend—a white man—had murdered the Ryens.

I met Kevin Cooper in person for the first time in 2000. I had been studying his case for three years by that time, throughout the late 90s. Some more social context: it was during the late 90s that the LAPD Ramparts scandal broke. It was revealed that law enforcement officers were working in gangs to plant evidence on and falsely convict young men of color. Not long after, police in Philadelphia and Miami were found to be up to similar antics. There seemed to be a nationwide epidemic of evidence tampering and fabrication.

Given this context, it struck me as odd that many of the people in positions of authority I spoke to—including Attorney General Bill Lockyer and various members of the press—refused to entertain the idea that Cooper had been framed by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s department. Upon reflection, it is not odd at all. It is racist. Only someone who believes that African Americans are inherently criminal could believe that their vast overrepresentation in the nation’s prisons is not the result of a desperately biased criminal justice system in which evidence manipulation is a routine matter.

Priamos also complains that Cooper has access to the press through a website maintained by his supporters. I encourage people to go to that website and read the dissent that led to the staying of Cooper’s scheduled execution on February 9, 2004.

Ninth Circuit Judge James R. Browning writes: “Contrary to the State’s assurances, Cooper did not have a fair trial. Cooper has presented a sworn declaration of a state prison warden that, if believed, suggests that the State fabricated crucial evidence linking Cooper to the murders for which he has been convicted. Nor is the evidence of Cooper’s guilt overwhelming. Indeed, as the evidence mounts that the State used unreliable and fabricated evidence to convict Cooper, the evidence of his guilt correspondingly diminishes.”

If the LA Times prints this letter, it will be the first time that any part of Browning’s dissent finds its way into the mainstream press. For those who will scoff at the Ninth Circuit’s supposed left-wing bias, I encourage you to recall that, on February 9, 2004, the very clearly conservative United States Supreme Court upheld the Ninth’s Circuit’s stay unanimously. And the evidence of Cooper’s innocence has been mounting ever since, leading the Ninth Circuit to grant him a new hearing on the merits of his claims of evidence tampering, evidence destruction, and civil rights violations.

I was 38 in 2004 when Kevin Cooper came within four hours of being executed by the state of California. I was preparing to enter the prison to witness the execution when the stay was announced. And, consequently, I know someone beside Paula Priamos who suffers from PTSD, and that is Kevin Cooper, who sits in his four-foot by nine-foot cell in San Quentin—which is far from the pleasure palace Priamos makes it out to be—fighting for a new trial and, by extension, his life.

NEWS

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to hear ALL TEN of the issues that his legal team asked them to examine after he was unjustly denied relief by Federal District Court Judge Marilyn Huff. Read the issues here.

"Just ONE piece of evidence proving that Kevin Cooper was railroaded
onto death row: During Kevin's original trial, prosecutors alleged
that a tennis shoe print found at the scene of the crime could only
have come from a prison, implicating Kevin. However, the "Dude" tennis
show was not prison-issued, it was available in stores and in catalogs
such as this one. Kevin's original trial lawyer, David Negus, submitted to the courts a declaration that shows the significance of this information: He declared, "At the time of trial, I was not aware that Pro Keds Dudes tennis shoes were listed for sale in a retail catalogue. Had I known this information at that time, I would have featured that fact prominently in the defense at trial."