In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom sent last month, American Bar Association President Mary Smith expressed her organization’s “ongoing concerns regarding the case of death-row inmate Kevin Cooper.”
The concerns center on a report released last January by the law firm Morrison Foerster, tasked by Newsom in 2021 to conduct an innocence investigation into Cooper’s case, that concluded Cooper was guilty of the quadruple murder he was convicted of committing in San Bernardino County in 1983. “The evidence of Cooper’s guilt is extensive and conclusive,” Morrison Foerster stated in the report.
Cooper was sentenced to death in 1985 and has been on death row ever since.
Smith noted that the ABA has not taken “a position for or against the death penalty per se, but it has long been concerned with due process and accuracy in criminal cases and particularly in capital cases due to the irrevocable nature of the penalty.”
As a result, the ABA’s concerns with the Morrison Foerster report include the fact that crucial evidence was withheld by law enforcement, and the organization is urging Newsom “to take action to ensure that the State discloses all relevant evidence and that any such evidence is evaluated before acting on Mr. Cooper’s petition for executive clemency.”
The ABA echoes the same concerns Cooper’s pro bono law firm, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, voiced after the Morrison Foerster findings were released. The Special Counsel failed to conduct an independent innocence investigation and produced a report “riddled with a steadfast commitment to ‘stick to the script’ the prosecution has been peddling for the last 40 years,” Orrick stated in its rebuttal. “Special Counsel’s Report is filled with confirmation bias, incompetent analyses, and conclusory statements that are unsupported by any reasoned analysis. Incompetently, Special Counsel did not seek to uncover significant issues bearing on Mr. Cooper’s innocence, including an improper police investigation, prosecutorial misconduct, and ineffective assistance of counsel.”
University of San Francisco School of Law professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever expressed similar criticisms in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed. Headlined “Why California’s reinvestigation of an infamous quadruple murder case is a sham,” they maintained that the investigation “flunk[s] the most basic tests for what constitutes a robust, thorough, and neutral post-conviction case review.”
Smith noted that the ABA has been concerned about the Cooper case for years and pointed to a letter then-ABA President Paulette Brown sent to then-Gov. Jerry Brown, in 2016, stating that his “arrest, prosecution, and conviction are marred by evidence of racial bias, police misconduct, evidence tampering, suppression of exculpatory information, lack of quality defense counsel, and a hamstrung court system.” And the ABA argued at the time, an investigation into Cooper’s claims of innocence was necessary to “maintain public confidence in the integrity of California’s capital punishment system.”
Smith concluded, “This concern remains as important and relevant today as it was seven years ago. I thank you for the careful approach you have taken with consideration of this matter up to this point and urge you to order additional investigation.”
ABA Urges Transparency in Kevin Cooper Case: A Call for Justice and Due Process
