But in 2007, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stated that “the district court, and all state courts, have repeatedly found, evidence of Cooper’s guilt was overwhelming. The tests that he asked for to show his innocence ‘once and for all’ show nothing of the sort.”
Two years later, Judge William A. Fletcher wrote that “the State of California may be about to execute an innocent man,” adding that police might have tampered with evidence, and the Ninth Circuit should have reheard the case and should have “ordered the district judge to give Cooper the fair hearing he has never had.”
Five other judges joined in Fletcher’s dissent, saying that Cooper never had a fair hearing to determine his innocence.
Meanwhile, DNA testing later found that there was “strong evidence” Cooper’s DNA was extracted from items of evidence: a bloodstain in the Ryen’s home, saliva on two cigarette butts in the Ryen station wagon, and a bloodstain on a T-shirt found beside a road near the Ryen home.
However, those tests were called into question.
Citing Judge Fletcher, The New York Times did a writeup on Cooper’s case in 2010 about the evidence against Cooper:
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.
But in 2004, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said no clemency should be granted in Cooper’s case.
“I have carefully weighed the claims presented in Kevin Cooper’s plea for clemency. The state and federal courts have reviewed this case for more than 18 years. Evidence establishing his guilt is overwhelming, and his conversion to faith and his mentoring of others, while commendable, do not diminish the cruelty and destruction he has inflicted on so many. His is not a case for clemency,” Schwarzenegger wrote.
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