A special counsel picked by Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a report that found that evidence pointing to the guilt of Kevin Cooper, who was convicted in a 1983 quadruple homicide in Chino Hills, “is extensive and conclusive.”
It has been a few years, but I’ve talked to Cooper’s lawyers, who have maintained his innocence in the Chino Hills killings. They know about the rapes for which he was charged but not tried — because he faced charges for capital murder. They should understand that Cooper is a danger to society, but they so want to believe that they are noble protectors of the innocent, that they have latched onto crazy conspiracy theories.
The special counsel report, produced by the law firm Morrison & Foerster, stuck to the facts — that “the evidence of his guilt is conclusive” in the murders of chiropractors Doug and Peggy Ryen, their daughter Jessica, 10, and houseguest Christopher Hughes, 11. The Ryens’ son Josh, age 8, survived the night even though his throat had been slit.
Because Cooper is Black, he and his attorneys have argued that his conviction is the result of racism. But really, law enforcement focused on Cooper because he had escaped from a nearby correctional facility and had been holed up in a vacant house next to the Ryen home.
I reached out to Cooper’s attorneys last week, and did not receive a reply. But the law firm Orrick did release this statement, which I share:
January 14, 2023
Kevin Cooper has suffered imprisonment as a death row inmate for more than 38 years for a gruesome crime he did not commit. We are therefore extremely disappointed by the special counsel’s report to the Board of Parole Hearings and disagree strongly with its findings. Most fundamentally, we are shocked that the governor seemingly failed to conduct a thorough review of the report that contains many misstatements and omissions and also ignores the purpose of a legitimate innocence investigation, which is to independently determine whether Mr. Cooper’s conviction was a product of prosecutorial misconduct. The report failed to address that critical issue. The evidence when viewed in this light reveals that Kevin Cooper is innocent of the Ryen/Hughes murders, and that he was framed by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department.
The special counsel’s investigation ordered by Governor Newsom in May 2021 was not properly conducted and is demonstrably incomplete. It failed to carry out the type of thorough investigation required to explore the extensive evidence that Mr. Cooper was wrongfully convicted. Among other things, the investigation failed to even subpoena and then examine the files of the prosecutors and interview the individuals involved in the prosecution. For unknown reasons and resulting in the tragic and clearly erroneous conclusion that he reached, the special counsel failed to follow the basic steps taken by all innocence investigations that have led to so many exonerations of the wrongfully convicted.
In effect the special counsel’s report says: the Board of Parole Hearings can and will ignore Brady violations, destruction of exculpatory evidence, planted evidence, racial prejudice, prosecutorial malfeasance and ineffective assistance of trial counsel; since I conclude Cooper is guilty based on what the prosecution says, none of these Constitutional violations matter or will be considered and we have no obligation to investigate these claims.
Given that (1) we have already uncovered seven prosecutorial violations of Brady v. Maryland during Mr. Cooper’s prosecution, (2) one of the likely killers has confessed to three different parties that he, rather than Mr. Cooper, was involved in the Ryen/Hughes murders, and (3) there is significant evidence of racial bias in Mr. Cooper’s prosecution, we cannot understand how Mr. Cooper was not declared wrongfully convicted.. The special counsel specifically declined to address ineffective assistance of counsel at the trial or the effect of race discrimination. We call on the governor to follow through on his word and obtain a true innocence investigation.
Likewise in 2021, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof fingered another would-be suspect here.
This other suspect is a white man whom I’ll identify just by his first name, Lee, for he must be presumed innocent. Lee is a convicted murderer who had completed his sentence and been out of prison for less than a year when the Ryens were killed.
Lee came to the attention of the authorities during the investigation after his girlfriend, Diana Roper, fingered him as the killer: She reported that he had returned home late on the night of the killings wearing bloody coveralls, in a car that resembled the Ryens’ station wagon.
Roper turned Lee’s bloody coveralls over to the sheriff’s office — which eventually threw them away without testing them. By then, the sheriff’s office had arrested Cooper, and deputies didn’t want a complication.
Oops. Lee Furrow provided a DNA sample to the Cooper legal team and it did not match DNA found at the Ryen home. But also, as the special counsel noted, Lee Furrow had an alibi. From the special counsel:
To the contrary, Furrow not only lacks a motive or interest in the murders, but he has a solid alibi based in part on statements from outside parties who don’t have an interest or agenda in the inquiry in any manner.
Team Cooper has peddled the bogus claim that San Bernardino officials deliberately framed the escaped convict as political pressure mounted for the crime to be solved. But, the report noted:
There is no evidence to suggest that Sheriff Tidwell was facing any political pressure, or criticism for failing to solve the crime as early as June 5 or June 6, 1983, when Cooper suggests the plan to frame Cooper was initiated. Further, a plan to frame Cooper would likely have needed to involve numerous persons to collect all the evidence and stage it in the Lease house for Sibbitt and Burcham to find by around noon on June 7, 1983. There is no direct or circumstantial evidence that such an elaborate plot was created within hours of the murders, implemented, and then concealed for the nearly 40 years since the crimes. It should also be noted how risky it would have been for officers to decide within a day or two of the murders to frame Cooper for the crimes. There had not been much, if any, testing of the evidence collected within the first two days after the victims were found. For all the Sheriff’s Department knew on June 5 or June 6 when this hypothetical plan to frame Cooper would have had to have been hatched, there was physical evidence that would have precluded Cooper as the killer or that conclusively pointed to someone else. Further Cooper might have had an ironclad alibi. Any decision to plant evidence in 47 the Lease house to frame Cooper could have ruined any later prosecution of the “true” killer.
I get the conceit. There is nothing progressives like Kristof want more than to see themselves as noble individuals fighting for the underdog. They want to believe that homicide detectives are racist and that death-row is filled with innocent men, unjustly treated by society and in desperate need of do-gooder champions like the willfully gullible Kristof. (As of this writing, Kristof has not commented on the special counsel report.)
Their blind spot is that they don’t see who the true underdogs are: Doug and Peggy Ryen, their daughter Jessica, their son’s friend Christopher Hughes, and Josh Ryen, who gets to spend the rest of his life trying to survive what Kevin Cooper did to him and his family.
Debra J. Saunders is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org.
Addendum: Here is a PDF of the special counsel’s report.