By:
Dan Sharber
This is a review of Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper
by J. Patrick O'Connor, published in 2012 by Strategic Media Books.
Kevin Cooper is an innocent man on death row in California. And if
you have been around the anti-death penalty movement for any amount of
time, you most likely know this or have at least heard of Kevin Cooper.
Now, thanks to the spellbinding new book,
Scapegoat, by J. Patrick O’Connor, many, many more people will hopefully know his story too.
This book is fantastic for a few different reasons.
The first is that O’Connor is simply a talented writer. He uses the
facts of the story to reconstruct it in such a way as to build a
tension-filled legal thriller in the vein of John Grisham. But unlike a
Grisham novel or other true crime books of this ilk, O’Connor doesn’t
just relay the story, he also spends a lot of time critiquing events and
pointing out where things went wrong. This elevates the book above the
level of a garden-variety true crime story and situates it firmly in the
realm of political critique of the criminal justice system.
O’Connor’s strength is his unwillingness to simply
let the facts of the mishandling of Cooper’s case speak for themselves
and rather to hammer home the police misconduct, the prosecutorial
shenanigans and Cooper’s own defense attorney’s screw ups.
Mainly, this is a simple story of racist scapegoating at its worst.
On the morning of June 5, 1983, Douglas and Peggy
Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and Christopher Hughes were
found dead in the Ryen home. They had been chopped with a hatchet,
sliced with a knife, and stabbed with an ice-pick. Josh Ryen, the
8-year-old son of Douglas and Peggy, had survived though his throat had
been cut. It is important to note right away two things about this
uncontested account. First, one person could not possibly have wielded
that many weapons and subdue that many people. It is not humanly
possible. And secondly, the only living witness Josh Ryen, initially
said that Cooper was not the killer even telling a social worker in the
emergency room that the murders were committed by 3 or 4 white men.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department
deputies who responded to the call decided almost immediately that Kevin
Cooper was the likely killer because he had admittedly hidden out in
the vacant Lease house next door to the crime scene for two days
(leaving on June 4th) and because he was a convenient black man in
largely white San Bernardino.
As anyone reading this will already know, the
criminal justice system and specifically the application of the death
penalty is full of racial bias. This bias extends not only to the race
of the defendants singled out for death sentences but also to the race
of the victim.
African Americans are 12 percent of the U.S.
population, but 42 percent of prisoners on death row. In Pennsylvania,
Louisiana and Maryland, and in the U.S. military and federal system,
more than 60 percent of those on death row are Black; Virginia,
Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Ohio all have
death rows where more than 50 percent are African American. Although
Blacks constitute approximately 50 percent of murder victims each year,
80 percent of the victims in death penalty cases were white, and only 14
percent were Black.
The cards were stacked against Cooper before his
name was even known. Likewise, the misconduct in this case also began
even before Cooper was pegged as the perpetrator.
In a shocking example of prosecutorial overreach,
the District Attorney, Dennis Kottmeier had the crime scene torn down
after only a couple of days of investigation. This prevented any experts
from reconstructing or reenacting what happened that night in the
Ryen’s home. Further, even the little bit of forensic work that was done
was totally botched and contaminated at every stage of the process.
O’Connor does an especially good job of pointing
out the shocking level of incompetence of both the police force and the
District Attorney’s office, even prior to the racist scapegoating that
occurs once they discover Cooper was in the area.
It is then that things really heat up. Evidence is now pretty conclusively planted in the nearby house Cooper hid in.
A blood-stained khaki green button identical to
buttons on field jackets issued at the state prison from which Cooper
escaped was found on the rug at the Lease house; a hatchet covered with
dried blood and human hair that was found near the Ryens' home was
missing from the Lease house, and the sheath for the hatchet was found
in the bedroom where Cooper had stayed.
These two pieces of evidence appeared a day after
the house had been searched and no such evidence had been found. Both
the button and the sheath were clearly planted in the Lease house. It
was established at trial that the prison jacket Cooper was wearing was
tan, not green. And it was never established that the sheath matched
the hatchet that was used in the crime.
The tragedy though is not simply that Kevin Cooper
could be executed for a crime he didn’t commit but also that the Ryen
family murders have not be solved and the perpetrators are still at
large. The local police had access to evidence and multiple accounts
from witnesses at various times pointing to a group of (3 – 4 white) men
who were most likely the killers. Because this didn’t conform to their
hardened view that Cooper was the murder, they disregarded all of it.
What’s more, the police even went so far as to
destroy evidence. While destroying exculpating evidence by crooked cops
is probably not all that uncommon, the disregard they show for finding
the real killer is shocking. Shortly after the murders, a woman came
forward saying she thought her (white) boyfriend was involved, as he had
left a pair of bloody overalls at her house. It took many efforts on
her part to merely get the police interested enough to come and pick up
the overalls and interview the witness. However instead of using this
new lead to expand the search away from Cooper, the police destroyed the
overalls - what was likely the largest single piece of exculpatory
evidence in their possession. This witness also claimed that a hatchet
was missing from her garage.
In a recent interview with Prison Radio, O'Connor
pointed out that "while Cooper’s trial was in progress, an inmate in a
California prison told prison authorities and a San Bernardino County
Sheriff’s detective that his cellmate had confessed to the Chino Hills
murders, stating it was an Aryan Brotherhood hit but the three killers
had gone to the wrong house."
At this point the case just gets totally absurd.
The defense attorney, David Negus, clearly did not know what he was
doing and made mistake after mistake both procedurally and
argumentatively. Even with a large amount of tainted evidence and clear
misconduct on the part of the police and the DA’s office, Negus still
did not put together a coherent defense. Cooper was unsurprisingly
convicted and sentence to death row.
But the misconduct isn’t over. Clearly Cooper had
some solid grounds for appeals but those too were thwarted at every turn
- from the incompetent police lab techs willfully destroying evidence
(only to find it again when it served their case) to the appellate judge
maliciously denying Cooper all sorts of legal maneuvers for no other
reason than spite.
Overall, I, even as a seasoned anti-death penalty,
anti-police activist, was shocked at the level of unfairness, corruption
and general incompetence that riddled this case.
There is so much more to discuss on this case that I
do not have the space to get into here. Suffice it to say, this book is
well worth reading. It gives an inside view of not just how one man was
railroaded and could be murdered by the state for a crime he didn’t
commit, but it’s also a glimpse into the very real way that this racist
scapegoating happened and continues to happen throughout the criminal
‘justice’ system. Get mad and then get involved!
What you can do:
Download and share this
fact sheet about Kevin's case.
