Gov. Newsom, Kevin Cooper Is Guilty

Californians should not accept a governor who won’t stand up for victims.

Kevin Cooper used to tell reporters that he wanted DNA testing, which didn't exist when he went to trial, to prove that he was not guilty of the four 1983 murders that put him on California's death row. If the tests implicated him, he said, he would drop his appeals.
In 2000, Cooper got those tests -- and they nailed him.
DNA tests placed Cooper in the Chino Hills home of chiropractors Doug and Peggy Ryen, who were found dead with their daughter Jessica, 10, and houseguest Christopher Hughes, 11. The Ryens' 8-year-old son Josh somehow survived after he was left for dead with a slit throat. At trial, Cooper had denied entering the Ryen home.
Cooper, who had escaped the California Institution for Men and was hiding out at an unoccupied house near the Ryen home, testified he didn't drive the Ryen station wagon as he fled the scene of the crime -- but DNA testing of cigarette butts established he had been in the family car.
Unfazed, Cooper and his team of corporate lawyers came up with a new story -- that the positive DNA test proved Cooper had been framed. How else could his DNA have been there?
And since it's California, gullible politicians have gone along with this bogus version of events.
Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed an executive order directing the law firm of Morrison and Foerster to conduct "an independent investigation" into Cooper's case because prosecutors and defense hold "starkly different views regarding how the results should be interpreted." Overwhelming evidence couldn't compete with the NAACP and movie stars proclaiming Cooper's innocence and blaming the conviction on racism, Criminal Justice Legal Foundation head Michael Rushford offered.
In 2004, when I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, a group of high-profile lawyers sat with the editorial board and laid out an intriguing case about how an innocent man, Kevin Cooper, had been framed.
I looked into it. In short order, I talked to two men who had worked for Cooper's defense team -- only to r...