On May 28, 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom exercised his clemency authority under the California constitution and ordered an independent investigation into death-row prisoner Kevin Cooper’s case. Cooper was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1985 for the 1983 murder of four people in Chino Hills but has always maintained his innocence. Despite allegations of racial bias and police and prosecutorial misconduct during trial, and new evidence seeming to call Cooper’s guilt into question, Cooper’s conviction and sentence have repeatedly been affirmed by the courts. In 2016, Cooper filed a petition for executive clemency with then-California Governor Jerry Brown, who ordered DNA testing in the case in 2018 before leaving office. After the results of the DNA testing proved inconclusive, Governor Newsom has now expanded the scope of the innocence investigation into the case.
Background
In 1983, three members of the Ryen family and a neighbor’s son were found dead in the Ryen’s home. Cooper was convicted of the murders in 1985. One of the main reasons for suspecting Cooper was that, two days before the murders were committed, Cooper escaped from the minimum security section of the California Department of Corrections California Institute for Men at Chino. According to Cooper’s 2016 clemency petition, after his escape on June 2, 1983, he hid out for two days in an empty house, which happened to be the closest house to the Ryens’. According to the petition, he moved on from the house on June 4th, hitchhiked to Mexico, and found work on a private boat which stopped at ports in southern California. On July 30, 1983, after police learned of his escape and found evidence of his having stayed at the house neighboring the Ryen’s, Cooper was arrested when the boat was stopped in Santa Barbara.
Evidentiary Issues at Trial
At trial, the State introduced physical and testimonial evidence of guilt which has since been discredited. For example, the State put on evidence that shoeprints left at the crime scene could only have been made by prison-issued shoes, such as Cooper’s, but the shoes the State alleged Cooper wore were actually available for sale to the public. The State also put on testimony by a San Bernardino County Sherriff’s Department (SBSD) criminalist, who claimed a drop of blood found in the Ryens’ hallway matched Cooper’s blood type. But five Ninth Circuit Judges later acknowledged that these results were suspect. Judge William A. Fletcher wrote, “The blood sample in A-41 has had a disturbing pattern of being entirely ‘consumed’ in the testing, and then reappearing in a form that could be subjected to further testing.” To establish a motive, the State argued that Cooper committed the murders to steal the Ryens’ car and money. However, the Ryens left the keys in both of their cars parked in their driveway, and money and credit cards were found at the Ryens’ house “untouched and in plain sight.”
Later investigations into Cooper’s case have also raised questions as to whether SBSD mishandled evidence. According to a sworn statement, on June 9, 1983, a woman named Diana Roper gave her boyfriend Lee Furrow’s blood-spattered coveralls to the SBSD and said she had “reason to believe that Furrow had committed the murders.” The SBSD ended up simply destroying the coveralls. In 2002, DNA tests were conducted on a tan t-shirt that was found discarded near the Ryens’ house and on the drop of blood from the Ryens’ hallway. While Cooper’s DNA was initially detected on both sources, later testing showed that the blood from the t-shirt “contained heightened levels of EDTA, a chemical used to preserve blood.” The presence of this chemical may support the defense theory that the SBSD planted Cooper’s blood on the t-shirt prior to the DNA testing. In 2009, when the Ninth Circuit denied Cooper’s Petition for Rehearing, Judge Fletcher stated, “Evidence available from the EDTA testing that has been done so far, and new evidence of evidence tampering connected with vial VV-2, substantially increases the likelihood that the State presented false evidence at trial in violation of Mooney and Napue.”
Statements have also come to light indicating that when first interviewed, the surviving victim, the Ryens’ son, stated that the crime had been committed by three white or Hispanic men. Cooper is Black. At trial, the State introduced testimony by the Ryens’ son Josh, who had survived the attacks. The testimony was “he saw either a single man or a single shadow in the house during the murders.” However, evidence later emerged that Ryen had initially told a social worker in the hospital that the perpetrators were three white men. This statement is further supported by two witnesses, who stated they saw “three white men in a station wagon matching the description of the Ryens’ station wagon speeding away from the direction of the Ryens’ home” the night the murders took place.
Procedural History
Cooper pursued and lost appeals of his conviction and death sentence throughout the state and federal courts. In 2004, he was scheduled to be executed, but a day before the execution was supposed to take place the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted him a stay of execution. The Ninth Circuit remanded to the district court for further testing of evidence, but the testing seemed to confirm Cooper’s guilt. Cooper later sought a writ of certiorari from the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Cooper’s petition for a writ of certiorari. In response to this, in 2011, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, the pro bono law firm which had been representing Cooper since 2003, petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) “in hopes of raising international pressure” about the case. The IACHR found violations of due process and evidence of racial bias in several aspects of Cooper’s case.
Efforts at Clemency
In 2016, Orrick filed a clemency petition and request for DNA testing. The petition, addressed to former California Governor Brown, detailed evidence of racism involved in the court proceedings, misconduct committed by the SBSD, and laid out the various facts pointing to Cooper’s innocence. The petition stated, “In its report, the IACHR recounted the myriad of indications that Mr. Cooper faced racism in his prosecution: from the SBSD’s ignoring evidence implicating three white males as the perpetrators, to the District Attorney’s refusal to allow the case to be transferred to a racially diverse forum, to the statistical evidence that, in the United States, a black person is more likely to receive the death sentence than a white person.”
In 2016, Paulette Brown, then-President of the American Bar Association, sent a letter urging former Governor Brown to use his executive clemency authority to initiate an investigation into his case. The letter stated, “Given the diverse evidence casting doubt on Mr. Cooper’s guilt and the inability of any court to meaningfully review this information in light of strict procedural bars, we encourage you to use your clemency authority to ensure that a full and transparent investigation of Mr. Cooper’s guilt is conducted before any execution date is set.” The letter went on to state that a careful investigation is necessary to “prevent the possibility of a miscarriage of justice–one that can never be undone.”
Governor Newsom’s May 2021 Order
In his May 28, 2021 order, Governor Newsom stated that “Mr. Cooper maintains that he is innocent of the crimes of which he was convicted and contends that the evidence introduced at trial against him was manufactured, mishandled, planted, tampered with, or otherwise tainted by law enforcement.” The order further stated that “especially in cases where the government seeks to impose the ultimate punishment of death, I need to be satisfied that all relevant evidence is carefully and fairly examined.”
Governor Newsom’s decision has not gone without opposition. In March 2021, before Newsom’s latest order, San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson sent a letter to Governor Newsom expressing his opposition to further review of Cooper’s innocence claims. Anderson stated, “Cooper’s claims and defenses are not new or novel, and they have been repeatedly examined and tested for more than thirty-five years.”
Governor Newsom’s order appoints the law firm of Morrison and Foerster, LLP to conduct an independent investigation of all of the records and facts in the case, including the outcome of the most recent round of DNA tests. In response to the order, Cooper’s attorney Norman Hile said, “we are confident that a thorough review will demonstrate that Kevin Cooper is innocent and should be released from prison.”