February 13, 2004, 8:42 a.m.
Move Over, Mumia
There’s a new celebrity on death row.

On those occasions when the Muse is elusive, when the words don't flow as I might wish, when the writer's demon, the blank page, stares me squarely in the face and says, "Now, what?" I often look to the justices of Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for inspiration. They have seldom failed me.

The latest outrage to issue from this court is the stay of execution granted to convicted murderer Kevin Cooper, who was scheduled to die at California's San Quentin Prison at 12:01 Tuesday morning. Some background: On June 2, 1983, Cooper escaped from the California Institute for Men, about 35 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. He had been housed in a minimum-security area of the prison after being convicted of burglary under the alias David Trautman. (California authorities did not learn until too late that Cooper was an escapee from a Pennsylvania prison. Advances in fingerprint technology presumably would prevent such a lapse from occurring today.) There is uncontroverted evidence that Cooper, after fleeing the California prison, broke into and hid in an empty house in Chino Hills, about two miles away. Cooper made several calls to his girlfriend from the house, the last coming at about 8:00 P.M. on June 4.

On the night of June 4, four people were savagely murdered in the house next door to the one where Cooper had been hiding. A fifth victim miraculously survived the attack. The bodies of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their ten-year-old daughter Jessica, and eleven-year-old houseguest Chris Hughes were discovered the next day by Chris's father. Clinging to life was eight-year-old Joshua Ryen, who had spent some eleven hours with his fingers pressed to his bleeding throat while lying next to his dead mother. All the victims had been stabbed and hacked with a buck knife and a hatchet.

Cooper fled to Mexico, but was apprehended in July 1983 when he was accused of raping a woman at knifepoint. He was returned to San Bernardino County, tried, and convicted for the Chino Hills crimes, and sentenced to death. His case has wound its way through the various appellate courts ever since, and on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court refused to vacate the eleventh-hour stay granted by an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit.

Cooper's defense team is today led by Lanny Davis, best remembered as the shameless mouthpiece for an even more shameless former president. "We got ‘em!" exclaimed Davis when the Supreme Court refused to vacate the stay of execution. "The Supreme Court of the United States tonight ratified the fundamental concept of the American justice system, which is the truth must come out before we kill a man." Mr. Davis's commitment to the truth has not visibly advanced, it seems, since the days he spent shilling for Bill Clinton.

So, what is the truth? The truth is that Kevin Cooper is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, indeed beyond any doubt, of the crimes for which he was convicted. To obfuscate this inconvenient fact, the Cooper defense team has woven a phantasmagoric tale of previously ignored witnesses and evidence, imaginary suspects, and, of course, police corruption and planted evidence. The defense contends that the strands of blond or light brown hair found clutched in Jessica Ryen's hand eliminates Cooper, a black man, as a suspect. But this hair proves nothing. As was shown at the trial, these hairs were cut, not pulled, and were in all likelihood deposited by a houseguest sometime before the murders only to be picked up as Jessica writhed on the floor before dying.
The defense also attempts to make an issue of a shoe print left at the crime scene. The print was linked to a type of shoe distributed in California prisons, and a representative of Stride Rite Shoes testified at trial that the shoe in question, the "Pro-Ked Dude," was manufactured solely for distribution in prisons and other institutions. To bolster Cooper's claim of an alternate suspect (known around the courthouse as the "Some Other Dude" defense), Davis produced a statement from Midge Carroll, who served as the prison warden at the time of Cooper's escape. "I learned that the shoes we carried were not prison-manufactured or specially designed prison-issue shoes," Carroll wrote. "I learned that the shoes were common tennis shoes available to the general public through Sears and Roebuck other such retail stores . . ."

From this the Ninth Circuit's majority opinion draws the following inference: "[I]f Warden Carroll had been put on the stand and had been believed by the jury, the jury would have known that Cooper was almost certainly not wearing ‘Pro-Ked Dude' shoes." But the jury would have known no such thing. The most favorable conclusion the jury might have drawn for Cooper was that, by some incalculably improbable twist of fate, Some Other Dude had committed the murders while wearing shoes exactly like those issued in prison, and had done so only minutes after Cooper left the house next door. Inconveniently for Cooper, similar shoe prints were also found in that home, and they were the only prints discovered there.

But Cooper hangs his greatest hope on science. A bloodstained T-shirt was found some distance from the crime scene, and DNA testing performed at Cooper's request during the appeal process (such testing was not available at the time of the trial) revealed the presence of both Cooper's and Doug Ryen's blood. The cops planted it, the defense now claims, and additional testing will reveal the presence of the preservative EDTA in the recovered blood sample. Some readers will recall a similar claim made during the O. J. Simpson trial, when the blood of both victims was found on a pair of socks recovered from Simpson's bedroom. I still shudder at the memory of one female juror facing the cameras and explaining the not-guilty verdict: "Well, there was ETA [sic] on them socks . . ." Yes, EDTA is used as a preservative in blood samples, but it is also present in laundry detergent and a wide variety of other common household items, and its presence in Cooper's case will be no more proof of his innocence than it was of Simpson's. And this evidence-planting theory presumes a staggeringly uncommon level of genius and cunning on the part of the allegedly corrupt cops: At Cooper's trial, prosecutors contended only that Doug Ryen's blood was on the T-shirt. Cooper's blood wasn't discovered until years later when the DNA testing was completed. In order for the defense's theory to hold water, one would have to believe that police officers planted the blood on the T-shirt, but then kept silent about it in the hope that it would be discovered when the science had sufficiently advanced. Not even Johnnie Cochran could tell a whopper like that with a straight face.

None of this matters to the death-penalty opponents who have made a hero out of Kevin Cooper. Jesse Jackson, Sean Penn, Richard Dreyfuss, and Denzel Washington have all joined in the effort to keep Cooper from his appointment with the executioner. And, like fellow convicted murderer Mumia Abu Jamal, Cooper has taken up the pen to become something of a celebrity among the Loony Left. It can only be a matter of time before someone nominates him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

— Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. "Jack Dunphy" is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.

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