“California may be about to execute an innocent man.”
That’s the view of five federal judges in a case involving Kevin Cooper, a black man in California who faces lethal injection next year for supposedly murdering a white family. The judges argue compellingly that he was framed by police.
…
Judge Fletcher laid out countless anomalies in the case. Mr. Cooper’s blood showed up on a beige T-shirt apparently left by a murderer near the scene, but that blood turned out to have a preservative in it — the kind of preservative used by police when they keep blood in test tubes.
Then a forensic scientist found that a sample from the test tube of Mr. Cooper’s blood held by police actually contained blood from more than one person. That leads Mr. Cooper’s defense team and Judge Fletcher to believe that someone removed blood and then filled the tube back to the top with someone else’s blood.
The police also ignored other suspects. A woman and her sister told police that a housemate, a convicted murderer who had completed his sentence, had shown up with several other people late on the night of the murders, wearing blood-spattered overalls and driving a station wagon similar to the one stolen from the murdered family.
They said that the man was no longer wearing the beige T-shirt he had on earlier in the evening — the same kind as the one found near the scene. And his hatchet, which resembled the one found near the bodies, was missing from his tool area. The account was supported by a prison confession and by witnesses who said they saw a similar group in blood-spattered clothes in a nearby bar that night. The women gave the bloody overalls to the police for testing, but the police, by now focused on Mr. Cooper, threw the overalls in the trash.
Filed under: Politics and Social | Tagged: Kevin Cooper, Racism |
For the Sake of Science 
If its all true, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was, than he should be released and given a clean record etc etc.
Than again, how many white defendants have been found to be not guilty later on due to police bias, judicial bias, insufficient legal counsel, lack of DNA testing at the time of conviction, so on and so forth.
If he is innocent than let him go, don’t tell me that if his race was a factor in conviction that his unlawful detention is any worse than any other person held when they were innocent. Its a terrible thing and his race doesn’t make it any more egregious.
I actually, at least partly, agree with Nate. I don’t see anything pointing to skin colour having anything to do with this, other than a black man happening to take the fall for a white one.
Of course it’s very possible, perhaps even likely, that race was the reason, but jumping to that conclusion based on nothing other than that, is racist in itself.
Well I just wanted to make the point also that even if it is skin color that led to his conviction, is that worse than the “classism” that has been noted in other cases like this? What about cases where someone with a criminal record is convicted because of that record?
Like in other cases I don’t see racism, if this is a case of it, as any worse than any other injustice of identical result.
Like Slater said, it probably is, but… so what? Wrong is wrong.
Yeah, I don’t see what rape has to do with anything here. The same scenario is possible with a white defendent. What if Cooper was gay, or an atheist. Why don’t we think that prejudice is at play.
There’s nothing to suggest the police department is all-white either.
What is more likely is that police quickly concluded it was Cooper because he escaped from prison on burglary charges and was hiding in a home 125 yards from the murder scene. Someone may have thought this was a robbery gone bad and tried to fake the facts. That’s certainly a problem, just not a racial one.
If the judges are right, then it’s clear this man was framed. It would be easy to chalk this all up to Cooper’s own circumstances (escape, past convictions), but there appears to be overwhelming evidence that the police ignored the white people involved.
We can’t go excusing a system that inherently disfavors black people for the sake of keeping white people out of prison.