Kevin Cooper (USA)

Case Background

Kevin Cooper was convicted of murder in 1985 and sentenced to death in California. He has always maintained his innocence and there are many unanswered questions about the case. You can learn more here.  Governors Brown and Newsom ordered additional DNA testing in 2018 and 2019, respectively. In May 2021, Governor Newsom ordered a full Innocence Investigation into Kevin Cooper’s case. 

Governor Newsom’s “independent investigation” has been met with sharp criticism from legal experts including Paula Mitchell, Director of the Los Angeles Innocence Project whose eighteen page report is included in the Rebuttal Memo (Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP), in response to the Special Counsel Report. 

“One of the clearest indicators that the Special Counsel failed to conduct an independent investigation” Mitchell writes, “is his failure to obtain and review all documents in the possession of the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department, including the crime lab, and other law enforcement agencies relating to the investigation into the Ryen-Hughes crimes. While it appears Special Counsel may have requested those records, it is my understanding they were never produced, nor did Special Counsel issue subpoenas to procure them…” 

University of San Francisco (USF) law professors and innocence claim experts who run the San Francisco Innocence Commission and USF’s Racial Justice Clinic, Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, explain in a San Francisco Chronicle OpEd (October 28, 2023): “The report is a sham, flunking the most basic tests for what constitutes a robust, thorough and neutral post-conviction case review. Newsom, who proudly touts his anti-death penalty credentials, would be dead wrong to accept it at face value…”  The USF Racial Justice Clinic team is representing Kevin in the recently enacted California Racial Justice Act (AB 256, Kalra).

Kevin is one of aproximately 570 people sentenced to death in California—the largest death row in the country. In 2024 he was transferred through the Condemned Inmate Transfer Program (CITP) to the California Health Care Facility (CHCF) in Stockton California. Learn more in “The last days of death row in California: ‘we are not allowed to be human here’ (by Iker Seisdedos, EL PAÍS).

Read about the DNA evidence in the Vanguard Investigation: Flawed Forensics and Unanswered Questions in Kevin Cooper Case (By David Greenwald, July 23, 2025).

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