After 33 years in jail – 31 spent on San Quentin Prison’s death row – Kevin Cooper’s last hope of avoiding execution rests in the hands of Gov. Jerry Brown.
The defense team for Cooper, convicted in February 1985 for the 1983 murders of a Chino Hills family and a neighbor, submitted a clemency petition to the governor Feb. 17, three months after a federal court reinstated the death penalty in California.
As Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Barry G. Silverman wrote when he stayed the convict’s execution in 2004, Cooper “is either guilty as sin or he was framed by the police.”
Even today, Silverman’s remarks reflect the polarized feelings about Cooper’s beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt guilt or innocence.
In 1985, a jury found Cooper – who had escaped a minimum-security prison and was holed up near the crime scene at the time of the murders – guilty of butchering Douglas and Peggy Ryen, 41-year-old chiropractors and Arabian horse trainers and breeders; their daughter Jessica, 10; and visiting neighbor Christopher Hughes, 11. He was also found guilty of the attempted murder of Joshua Ryen, the Ryens’ then-8-year-old son who survived a slashed throat.
San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Richard Garner, presiding over the change-of-venue trial in San Diego, accepted the jury’s recommendation for death. On May 15, 1985, Garner sentenced Cooper to die in the San Quentin State Prison gas chamber.
No one denies the murders – carried out with a hatchet, knives and either an ice pick or screwdriver – were horrific. But with the state’s moratorium on executions lifted in November, attention to the case has raised questions among some in the legal and law-enforcement communities as well as the anti-death penalty lobby.
The question of clemency stirs similarly strong sentiments on either side of the “guilty as sin” or “framed by police” argument. Past and present principals involved in the case either favor clemency or clamor for Cooper’s execution. As for Cooper himself, he has maintained his innocence since his arrest on July 30, 1983.
Neither Gov. Brown nor his staff would comment on the Cooper clemency petition, said Evan Westrup, Brown’s supervising public information officer, adding the governor has offered no timetable to answer the clemency petition.
For MaryAnn Hughes, mother of Christopher Hughes, the neighbor boy who would be 43 now had he lived, Cooper’s execution can’t happen soon enough.
It was her husband, William Hughes, who found the bodies of his son, the Ryens and a barely alive Joshua shortly before noon June 5, 1983. Concerned that no one answered the phone and Christopher hadn’t returned home to go to church after his overnight visit at the Ryens, William Hughes set out to look for his son.
What he found traumatized him and the entire neighborhood dotted with horse ranches and rural properties.
His fifth-grade classmates, teachers, parents, brother, relatives and friends attended the funeral Mass for Christopher, a boy described as happy and carefree. Her family continues to grapple with the pain of losing him, MaryAnn Hughes said.
“There is no new evidence,” she said in response to the clemency petition. “There is nothing that wasn’t given to the jury. This thing has been tried for 30-plus years through every avenue we have. Even when there was almost a new trial in 2004, when the Ninth Circuit Court (of Appeals) sent the appeal back to the district court in San Diego, the new things convicted him.”
There has always been “overwhelming evidence of his guilt. There is no doubt whatsoever that he is the guilty party,” she said. “Clemency is the only thing left for him.”
The Hugheses were especially irate over the American Bar Association’s recently announced support of Cooper’s bid for clemency.
In a letter sent to Gov. Brown on March 14, the American Bar Association alleged Cooper’s “arrest, prosecution and conviction are marred by evidence of racial bias, police misconduct, evidence tampering, suppression of exculpatory information, lack of quality defense counsel and a hamstrung court system.
“We therefore believe that justice requires that Mr. Cooper be granted an executive reprieve until the investigation necessary to fully evaluate his guilt or innocence is completed,” ABA President Paulette Brown wrote.
The letter shows the association’s “extra ignorance,” Hughes said, adding that Paulette Brown obviously didn’t understand the law because the governor “doesn’t have the authority to order a new trial or hearing. They (Cooper’s attorneys) have to petition the court to do that. Even the Ninth Circuit Court that sent this back down to the San Diego court didn’t order a new hearing or trial.
“It’s time for this to end,” Hughes said.
The attorneys who filed the request for clemency – Norman C. Hile of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s Sacramento office, and Oakland attorney David T. Alexander – joined the Cooper defense team at the request of the Northern California/University of Santa Clara chapter of The Innocence Project. Alexander prepared the 2004 petition that resulted in the Ninth Circuit Court staying the Feb. 10, 2004, execution of Cooper, sending the case back to the district court for full DNA testing of crime-scene clothing.
“The (clemency) petition asks the governor to stay the execution and then undertake an independent investigation to determine if Kevin Cooper is innocent. That independent investigation would be through the governor’s office, not the courts,” Hile said.
Hile asked retired Federal Bureau of Investigations veteran Thomas Parker in 2011 to lead the latest investigation. Parker spent 45 years with the FBI as an agent, national investigator of violent crimes and deputy chief of the Los Angeles regional office before retiring and founding The Sentinel Group, a domestic and international criminal justice investigation and analysis firm based in Temecula.
“I agreed because I was very interested in this case,” Parker said. “Shortly after reviewing some of the preliminary materials in this case, I was absolutely convinced that Kevin Cooper was innocent, and I decided I’d work pro bono (for free) on this. I was totally overwhelmed by the degree and volume of evidence of police malfeasance I found in this case.
“Unfortunately, it appears Mr. Cooper did not receive the benefit of being innocent until proven guilty. Once they learned of Mr. Cooper’s ‘walkaway’ escape from the minimum security section of a nearby incarceration facility just days before the (Ryens/Hughes) murders were committed, they presumed he was their man and forced the evidence to fit their prime suspect instead of finding the suspect who fits the evidence,” Parker said.
Parker calls the Cooper case “the most grievous case of police and prosecution incompetency I’ve ever seen in more than 45 years in law enforcement. I am convinced evidence was planted in this case and evidence that could have lead to the real killers was ignored. I’m absolutely convinced Kevin Cooper is innocent.”
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe is a global firm better known for its work in handling mergers and acquisitions than handling criminal cases. However, Hile said he and firm executives believe in Cooper’s innocence so strongly, the case will continue to be handled on a pro bono basis.
Even if Cooper is denied clemency and executed, Hile said he will continue to work to exonerate Cooper posthumously.
“Our justice system cannot afford to execute someone who’s innocent. We can’t execute innocent people if people are going to believe in our justice system.” Hile said.
Dennis Kottmeier, San Bernardino County district attorney from 1981 to 1994, and Floyd Tidwell, who served as the county sheriff from 1983 to 1991, are just as adamantly convinced of Cooper’s guilt as Hile, Parker and others are of his innocence.
Tidwell led the police investigation and international manhunt for Cooper, organizing a special task force of deputies to gather evidence in the case that led to Cooper’s conviction. Kottmeier was the lead prosecutor at trial.
Kottmeier and Tidwell haven’t budged from their original belief in Cooper’s guilt in 33 years. Nor do they intend to do so, they vowed.
“He does not deserve ever to get out of jail,” Tidwell declared when he heard about the latest clemency claim.
That man committed the most brutal murders I’ve ever noted in my 40-year career in law enforcement,” the former sheriff said. “He should stay on death row. His conviction could be commuted to life imprisonment, but I don’t think even that should happen. He deserves to be imprisoned and to face the death penalty.”
Kottmeier agreed. He called the new clemency attempt “wrong, especially since he was convicted of killing an entire family.”
The lone survivor, Joshua Ryen, has had “to grapple with the fact that his father, mother, sister and best friend were murdered and he was almost murdered,” Kottmeier continued. “Kevin Cooper should be put to death.”
Those who suffered the most and who sought “justice for the victims” were anxious to witness Cooper’s execution, said Kottmeier, who was at San Quentin with John Kochis, now retired San Bernardino County chief deputy district attorney, Joshua Ryen and lead police investigator Sgt. Bill Arthur in 2004 to witness Cooper’s execution. They experienced bitter disappointment when Cooper received a temporary reprieve.
“We can wait. Am I against clemency for Kevin Cooper?” Kottmeier rhetorically repeated. “You bet.”
But Cooper is picking up supporters, and not just among those on his team.
They include some jurors who convicted Cooper and recommended the death penalty, the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and victim Peggy Ryen’s sister, Lillian Shaffer, among others.
Shaffer said her sister was an expert markswoman and both she and Doug were “very strong people” as chiropractors and horse trainers.
“It seems impossible that he (Cooper) could have done all of that destruction by himself. One person certainly did not do it alone. I ask that a fresh look be taken at Kevin Cooper and his conviction,” Peggy Ryen’s sister said in her letter to Gov. Brown supporting clemency.
Texas attorney and law professor Sam D. Millsap Jr. called Cooper “a glaring example of the human wreckage, the living flotsam of a system that gets it wrong too often.” Although he believes the American criminal justice system is the world’s finest, he said the human factor “produces mistakes that destroy the lives of too many innocent men and women and could in this case lead to the execution of a man who has been butchered by a system that undermined the promise that our courts are fair and guarantee the protection of the innocent.”
Millsap called on Gov. Brown to “prevent this execution and say, in the process, that the result to date in this case is beneath the people of the state of California.”
The Cooper clemency is “a test of sorts,” Millsap added, warning “whether the state … passes this test will say more about its real values than it does about Kevin Cooper or the miserable creatures who commit horrible crimes.
“You have the power to ensure that the judgment of history will be that, when it came to Kevin Cooper, the state of California passed the test. Justice in this case is long overdue.”
Assistance has come from an unlikely corner – a prosecutor from Louisiana who tried a similar case. The move comes in part because A.M. Stroud III has publicly acknowledged that he ignored evidence that would have proven Glenn Ford’s innocence. Ford was exonerated in 2014 after spending 30 years on that state’s death row. He died of lung cancer a year later.
“Instead of searching for the truth, I was determined to convict Mr. Ford,” Stroud said. “Because of my actions, an all-white jury convicted Mr. Ford and sentenced him to death in December 1984. Thereafter, appellate courts upheld Mr. Ford’s wrongful conviction. As a result, Mr. Ford spent 30 years on death row in the maximum security penitentiary at Anglola, Louisiana, one of the most horrible prisons in the country.
“To be frank, when I prosecuted Mr. Ford for a crime he did not commit, I was arrogant, narcissistic and caught up in the culture of winning. I did not seek truth or justice. I sought only to win,” said Stroud.
The prosecutor has appeared on “60 Minutes” and in other media to apologize for his actions and warn other prosecutors from making “revenge for victims the dominate motivation and winning at all costs the goal.”
The local lawmen currently in office, San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon and District Attorney Mike Ramos, say Cooper’s conviction is just. They issued brief statements through their respective public information officers. Ramos vowed to formally fight Cooper’s petition for clemency.
The district attorney and sheriff stand firmly against clemency and an independent investigation.
“In 1983, there was a complete and thorough homicide investigation completed by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, identifying Kevin Cooper as the person responsible for the murder of four Chino Hills’ residents,” McMahon’s statement says.
“Due to the efforts of the district attorney, a jury found him guilty and the ultimate sentence was the death penalty,” McMahon wrote. “Since Kevin Cooper’s conviction, this case has been heard in multiple appellate courts, including the California Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court, and the conviction has been upheld again and again.”
Ramos’ statement was similar to McMahon’s:
“Using a hatchet, Kevin Cooper slaughtered Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and an 11-year-old houseguest Christopher Hughes and attempted to kill 8-year-old Joshua Ryen,” Ramos charged in his statement. “Cooper committed these atrocities after escaping from a nearby prison. He was convicted by a jury and his conviction has been affirmed by every court of appeal to review his case, including the California Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court.
“Enough is enough,” Ramos said.
