LOS ANGELES (AP) — An independent review of California death row inmate Kevin Cooper’s conviction found that evidence of his guilt was “extensive and conclusive” within the 1983 stabbing deaths of 4 people, including two children, at a suburban Los Angeles home.
Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the investigation in 2021 following years of Cooper’s pleas for clemency. The case had garnered national attention from people including now-Vice President Kamala Harris and reality star Kim Kardashian. The independent investigators’ report was released Friday.
Cooper, 65, maintained he was framed by investigators whom, he alleged, planted his blood on a T-shirt found by the side of a road leading away from the scene of the murders. He was originally scheduled for execution in 2004.
“Cooper has not established his claim that he’s innocent,” the report said.
The reviewers also wrote “there is no such thing as a reasonable possibility that more investigation beyond what has already been conducted on this matter could affect the conclusion that evidence of Cooper’s guilt is conclusive.”
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Cooper was convicted of a 1983 attack in Chino Hills, east of Los Angeles. Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 8-year-old son, Joshua, were attacked of their sleep together with an 11-year-old neighbor, Christopher Hughes, who was a houseguest. Investigators said they were stabbed greater than 140 times with an ice pick, knife and hatchet.
Joshua’s throat was slashed, but he survived.
San Bernardino County prosecutors said previous DNA tests showed that Cooper, who had escaped from a jail two days before the slayings, was within the Ryen home and smoked cigarettes within the family’s stolen station wagon, and that Cooper’s blood and the blood of a minimum of one victim was on a T-shirt. That T-shirt, and the DNA Cooper claimed was planted on it, was a central a part of Cooper’s argument for his innocence.
The case attracted national interest after The Recent York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristof, Harris, then a U.S. senator for California, and Kardashian urged officials to permit re-testing, which Newsom and former Gov. Jerry Brown ordered to be done.
Cooper’s attorney, Norman Hile, and the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment Friday evening regarding the brand new report.
“We’re confident in the outcomes of the independent investigation, and satisfied this case has been thoroughly and meticulously reviewed,” Vicky Waters, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said in a press release.
Newsom didn’t take a position on Cooper’s guilt or innocence, or whether to grant him clemency, when he ordered the review. Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in 2019.
His communications director, Erin Mellon, released a press release Friday acknowledging the report and its finding that “Mr. Cooper’s guilt is ‘extensive and conclusive.’”
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