Kevin Cooper is Guilty #4
The other crimes apologists like Nick Kristof ignore
Convicted killer Kevin Cooper must be the unluckiest guy in the world. After all, according to the death-row inmate and his defenders, Cooper has been falsely accused of four murders, leaving an 8-year-old boy for dead – and two rapes that happened more than a year apart in different parts of the country.
I write about Cooper because death-penalty opponents say he is a victim of a corrupt system that likes to put away innocent people, especially if they are black. They are so desperate to believe that they abandon common sense.
One person who really ought to know better, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof.
Remember Kevin Cooper? The Black man on death row in California for a quadruple murder after apparently being framed by the San Bernardino Co sheriff's office? The DNA testing is back and further undermines the case against Cooper:
Opinion | Is an Innocent Man Still Languishing on Death Row?
We’ve seen the DNA evidence in the Kevin Cooper case. It points elsewhere.
3:14 PM · Jan 23, 2021·TweetDeck
Kristof likes to portray himself as an ethical and caring person. He hand-wrings about how horrible the 1983 murders of California chiropractors Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and Christopher Hughes, 11, who was at the Ryen home for a sleepover were, and how badly he feels for Josh Ryen, who somehow survived after he was left for dead at age 8, and parents Bill and Mary Ann Hughes.
But gosh darn, Kristof maintains, he just wants more DNA testing.
Kristof fails to mention that Cooper himself used to argue that he wanted DNA testing, which was unavailable at the time of the murder trial – and pledge that if tests implicated him, he’d drop his appeals. Guess what happened….
When DNA put Cooper at the crime scene, Cooper came up with a new line – he was framed.
This post is about how Kristof, aka Mr. Sensitivity, has been willing to overlook Cooper’s history on sexual assault.
In Kristof’s most recent Cooper column, there is no mention of the two sexual assaults of which Cooper was charged.
“He has been accused of rape without being charged,” Kristof wrote in 2018 — when he at least recognized the crime:
“I’m particularly troubled by one episode. Cooper admits forcing a 17-year-old girl into a vehicle in 1982. She says that he also hit her, threatened to kill her and raped her, and she went afterward to a hospital to seek treatment; he flatly denies hitting or raping her. Hile says that if the evidence had been strong, Cooper would have been charged with rape. For my part, I can’t think why the girl would have lied, and although it’s impossible to know after 36 years what happened, it bothers me.”
Cooper’s attorney, however, did write about the rapes that bother Kristof.
In a letter seeking clemency from then California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Orrick’s Norman Hile writes of the Pennsylvania assault, “As a strategy decision during trial, Mr. Cooper stipulated in the penalty phase to the occurrence of those events, but he did not plead guilty to and has not been convicted of those crimes.”
Cooper also was arrested in Santa Barbara for forced oral copulation, rape by threat, sexual penetration by a foreign object with force and sodomy of a woman on a boat. The attack occurred in 1983, after the Chino Hills killings and after Cooper fled to Mexico, where he befriended a couple who invited him to join them as they sailed up the coast. Within weeks, Cooper was arrested for forced oral copulation, rape by threat, sexual penetration by a foreign object with force and sodomy of a woman on a boat.
According to Hile the charge of rape at knifepoint is not relevant as Cooper “has continuously maintained that the sexual interaction on the boat was consensual.”
To recap, Cooper’s defense team has come up with a long list of law enforcement officials who supposedly framed Cooper for racist reasons – and two women who would have lied about being raped by Cooper, one with a screwdriver to her throat, and another with a knife.
(Note: In an update, I replaced Kim Kardashian’s tweet with Nick Kristof’s tweet.)
Debra J. Saunders is a fellow at the Discovery Institute's Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org.