Kevin Cooper is Guilty
But do the willfully gullible care?
A special counsel commissioned by former Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed what serious people knew about convicted killer Kevin Cooper: He’s guilty of the 1983 Chino Hills slayings for which he was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985. A report was released late Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Over the years, Cooper, now 65, has managed to excite a stable of death-penalty opponents who have argued that he is an innocent man, framed because he is Black and had escaped from a nearby prison.
A jury, however, found Cooper guilty and a series of court rulings have upheld his conviction in the the brutal, violent 1983 slayings of chiropractors Doug and Peggy Ryen, their ten year-old daughter Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes. Hughes was enjoying a sleep-over with his friend Josh Ryen, when the boys heard the attack and went to the parent’s bedroom where they were assaulted violently. Left-for-dead with his throat slashed, Josh, then eight, somehow survived.
New York Times’ columnist Nick Kristof wants America to believe that racism led local law enforcement to pick on an innocent man. Or as Kristof wrote in 2021,
(C)alifornia for almost 38 years has prepared to ignore all this and execute a Black man who is probably innocent. Democratic and Republican politicians alike have mostly averted their eyes, presumably in part for fear of offending voters who might be upset at the exoneration of a Black man convicted of a brutal crime against a white family.
How did this case become a cause célèbre for the gullible? Cooper’s many lawyers know how to play the race card, and how desperately death penalty opponents want to believe that San Quentin’s death row inmates didn’t do it. Apparently they don’t think the moral argument against the death penalty is persuasive, so they resort to fiction.
For years, Cooper argued that he had been framed by racist law enforcement. His lawyers demanded DNA testing which, they argued, would exculpate Cooper. Cooper himself used to tell reporters that he wanted DNA testing, which didn't exist when he went to trial — and if the tests implicated him, he would drop his appeals.
Then Cooper got DNA testing — and the results nailed him.
Cooper did not drop his appeals. He came up with a new bogus story — that he could prove he was framed because forensics specialists found the chemical EDTA in blood evidence. Of course there was EDTA. It is a preservative used by law enforcement.
Former Gov. Jerry Brown, who once told me that there were no innocent men on California’s death row, decided to deal with the controversy by asking the law-firm Morrison & Foerster to investigate Cooper’s case. Newsom kept the probe going.
According to CBS News, Newsom, a death-penalty opponent, had not taken a position on Cooper’s guilt or innocence before the review. His communications director, Erin Mellon, released a statement Friday acknowledging the report and its finding that "Mr. Cooper's guilt is 'extensive and conclusive.'"
Don’t take my (or their) word for it, read the report. (PDF below.) It is thorough, it looks at the evidence, it follows up on claims about other possible killers, and then it ends up where jurors and court panels arrived.
“We’re not surprised, we’re relieved,” San Bernardino District Attorney Jason Anderson told me.
I hope Kristoff reads the report. It has the answers to the questions amateurs pop out.
Cooper is a career criminal who was on the run from robbery, kidnapping and rape charges in Pennsylvania when he was sentenced to four years on burglary charges under the alias David Trautman. As he awaited trial for burglary, Cooper escaped a minimum-security prison two miles from the Ryen home.
Authorities didn’t focus on Trautman/Cooper because he was Black, and they didn’t ignore tips that could have led elsewhere. When he was deeply in shock, Josh Ryen indicated that he saw three men. Kristof has written about three men at an area bar. But authorities interviewed two of those men, including a one-time convicted killer whom Kristof identifies by his first name, and they had confirmable alibis.
After Josh Ryen and the bodies were discovered by Christopher Hughes’ father, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department looked to inmates who had gone missing from the nearby California Institute for Men. Cooper was one of three inmates who recently escaped. (Sheriffs were able to narrow their focus to Cooper because he phoned two women while he hid out in a vacant house next to the Ryen home.)
Before he walked away from the California Institute for Men, Cooper escaped from two Pennsylvania institutions. The day after he escaped from Mayview State Hospital, he raped a 17-year-old who testified against Cooper at the Ryen murder trial.
That episode is so bad that Kristof had to admit he is “particularly troubled” by it. He wrote:
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.
Hello. Cooper wasn’t charged for that rape because he was facing the death penalty for the Ryen murders. The M&F report notes that Cooper stipulated at the murder trial that he kidnapped and raped the 17-year-old girl.
There’s more. After the Ryen murders, Cooper was arrested off Santa Cruz Island on charges that he raped and sodomized a woman at knifepoint after he spent two months hiding on a boat as authorities pursued him for the Chino Hills slayings.
I can’t wait to read what Nick Kristof has to say about this report. Do you think he’ll go from “particularly troubled” to really, really troubled?
Oregon, rejoice. The Oregon Supreme Court ruled last year that Kristof could not be on the ballot as a candidate for governor because he had failed to meet the state’s three-year residency requirement to run for the office. If that had not happened, if Kristof had won the governor’s seat, imagine how many dangerous individuals might be on the streets today. As it is, he can only endanger the reputation of the New York Times.
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 report.
Talk about a classic case of “confirmation bias” by Kristof.
The issue here is that even if Cooper did do it there were unambiguous signs of both incompetence and foul play on the part of prosecutors. Debra seems to view it as a zero-sum game and refuses to countenance the idea that misconduct occurred. Even if Cooper is guilty (and unless they can prove the peptidase testing was done well enough in 1983 to avoid that I won't be wholly convinced) the sheer amount of incompetence and misconduct means I'm not comfortable giving the death penalty.