Death row inmate's lawyer says his client was framed

The attorney requests that Kevin Cooper's case be returned to a lower court for further review.

By Henry Weinstein
Times Staff Writer

January 10, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO — More than 20 years after Kevin Cooper was sentenced to death for brutally murdering four people in Chino Hills, his attorney told a federal appeals panel Tuesday that questions about the case remained unresolved and that Cooper was entitled to further hearings and testing to clear up the mysteries.

During oral arguments before the panel, defense lawyer Norman Hile suggested that Cooper had been framed, that prosecutors at trial withheld material evidence that could have cleared him, and that his client had not received a full and fair hearing from U.S. District Judge Marilyn Huff in San Diego, the last jurist to consider the case.

But a veteran appellate lawyer for the California attorney general's office countered that Cooper was "guilty as sin" and that it was time to bring the case — which has been the subject of numerous appeals — to a close. "Enough is enough," said Deputy Atty. Gen. Holly D. Wilkens.

Cooper was sentenced to death in Riverside County Superior Court for a 1983 rampage in which a married couple and two children were hacked to death in Chino Hills.

Prosecutors alleged at trial that Cooper, then serving time for burglary, had faked a medical condition to escape from the state prison in Chino in 1983, then took refuge in a small house with a view of the hilltop home of Douglas and Peggy Ryen.

Two nights later, prosecutors stated, he broke into the Ryens' home and used a hatchet, knife and ice pick to kill the couple; their daughter, Jessica, 11; and houseguest Christopher Hughes, 11.

Prosecutors said Cooper also slashed the throat of the Ryens' 8-year-old son, Joshua, who lay next to his mother's body for 11 hours before he was found. He survived and later testified against Cooper.

Cooper, now 49, admits that he hid in the house near the Ryen residence. But he has steadfastly maintained that he hitchhiked out of the area and that he was not involved in the murders.

In February 2004, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, by a vote of 9 to 2, granted a last-minute stay of execution and ordered new testing of blood and hair evidence in the case. At the time, Barry Silverman, one of the judges in the majority, said: "Cooper is either guilty as sin or he was framed by the police. There is no middle ground."

More than a year later, after hearing testimony from 42 witnesses and reviewing test results, Huff in San Diego concluded in a 150-page ruling that Cooper should not receive any legal relief from the courts.

Noting post-conviction DNA testing that linked Cooper to a drop of blood in the hallway outside the Ryens' bedroom, saliva from cigarette butts found in the hallway and blood smears on a T-shirt abandoned outside a bar near the murder scene, Huff wrote that she was convinced that Cooper "is the one responsible for these brutal murders." She added that Cooper "is simply making unsubstantiated allegations of tampering as to evidence that was used against him at trial, or that subsequently confirmed his guilt from post-conviction DNA testing."

But Cooper's lawyers contend that Huff abused her discretion by denying some discovery and additional forensic testing. Hile, the defense lawyer, urged the appeals court to send the case back to Huff and order further testing, as well as admission of evidence about "three suspicious men," one wearing bloody clothes, who reportedly were seen shortly after the murders in a bar not far from the crime scene.

The three judges hearing the appeal are Pamela Ann Rymer of Pasadena, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush; Margaret McKeown of San Diego, an appointee of Bill Clinton; and Ronald Gould of Seattle, also a Clinton appointee. Whatever they decide, the ruling is likely to be appealed to a larger 9th Circuit panel and eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Rymer and Gould, both of whom rejected Cooper's bid for a stay in 2003, appeared skeptical Tuesday of defense claims of evidence-tampering.

McKeown asked several questions related to footprints of Keds shoes found inside the home and on a spa cover outside the master bedroom. Prosecutors stated at trial that the shoes were prison-issue and could not have been bought from a store.

Hile said Tuesday that when the former warden of the prison at Chino heard the prosecutors' contention, she called the San Bernardino County sheriff's office to tell them that the shoes could have been bought at a store. The defense was not informed of the call, a violation of the prosecution's obligation to turn over any potentially exculpatory evidence, Hile said.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Wilkens countered that there was no doubt Cooper was wearing that type of shoe at the time of the murders. Even if the shoe was commercially available, it proves nothing, she said.

After the hearing, a group of death penalty foes, some holding placards proclaiming "Free Kevin Now," held a rally outside the courthouse. Attorney Natasha Minsker, the death penalty coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said it was very troubling that there were so many unresolved questions about the case so long after the murders.

She said the case showed that the state had "insufficient standards and safeguards" for the handling of forensic evidence. That issue, and related ones, are to be taken up in Sacramento today at a hearing of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice.

*

 

Jury gets Aryan Brotherhood case

The trial focused on a series of murders that Robert 'Blinky' Griffin and John 'Youngster' Stinson allegedly used to maintain order.

 

By Joe Mozingo and Peter Y. Hong
Times Staff Writers

December 20, 2006

The case against two alleged leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang in California went to a jury Tuesday after six weeks of gruesome and bizarre testimony that painted prison gang life as a predatory dystopia where one must kill or be killed.

Robert "Blinky" Griffin, 59, and John "Youngster" Stinson, 52, are accused of ordering a series of murders to maintain discipline within the gang and, in doing so, strengthen its power and expand its drug-trafficking and extortion rackets.

If convicted on the racketeering charges, they could receive life in prison without the possibility of parole. Stinson is already serving a sentence of life without parole for a Long Beach murder. Griffin, who has been in prison since 1970, could be paroled in several years.

In court, the two wore sweater vests and sports jackets and tapped at laptop computers while a circus of cursing, hulking, tattooed inmates testified against them. Griffin's attorney called those witnesses a "parade of liars" in his closing statement.

He hammered at payments and favors the government gave to witnesses in exchange for their testimony and pointed out their past acts of perjury.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Mark Aveis conceded that many of the former Aryan brothers testifying against the defendants had credibility problems. One witness, Clifford Smith, who admitted killing 20 people in prison, was caught in a significant lie during a recent death penalty case. But Aveis said the totality of the testimony and physical evidence, including numerous letters and written messages, collected in the course of an eight-year investigation, prove the two were leaders of "an Aryan Brotherhood conspiracy."

He called Griffin "the emeritus figure in the A.B." — who got the nickname Blinky because he could order a hit simply by blinking.

This is the second major trial resulting from a 2002 indictment meant to break the gang that started in California and spread throughout the U.S.

The current case, being heard in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, has focused solely on the California faction. Prosecutors alleged that while Griffin, Stinson and other Aryan Brotherhood members were housed at the California Institution for Men at Chino in 1982, they hatched a plan to become more disciplined and more organized.

Two murders that year were seminal, prosecutors said.

When the gang could not get to a former member named Steven Barnes, who had testified against Griffin and was in protective custody, prosecutors said, member Curtis Price went to Barnes' family's home in Temple City and shot his father to death. The message was that if the gang couldn't get a snitch, it would go after his family.

That second was the killing of brotherhood member Steven "Loser" Clark, who was too high on heroin to trust anymore, according to testimony.

Four other murders in the 1980s and 1990s were key to the case. The defense argued that the murders had nothing to do with a conspiracy and that the men convicted of those crimes were now depicting the killings as a conspiracy only to get favors from the government.

"The government is presenting you a fraud," Stinson lawyer Terrence Bennett told jurors.

 

Sex offender guilty in Fla. girl‘s death

Staff and agencies
08 March, 2007

By CURT ANDERSON, Associated Press Writer

MIAMI - The sex offender convicted of kidnapping, raping and then killing 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford by burying her alive behind his trailer could now face the death penalty.

"With capital cases, I‘m all for the death penalty. It‘s an eye for an eye," the girl‘s father, Mark Lunsford, said Thursday on CBS‘ "The Early Show."

The little girl had been clutching a purple stuffed dolphin when she suffocated but had managed to poke two fingers through the bag.

In court Wednesday, Couey stared straight ahead and swayed slightly as the verdicts were read on charges of first-degree murder, sexual battery on a child, kidnapping and burglary. Lunsford, who has helped push efforts for tougher monitoring of sex offenders, showed no emotion.

Circuit Judge Richard Howard will ultimately decide Couey‘s sentence. He is not required to follow the jury‘s recommendation, but judges typically give the recommendation great legal weight.

He admitted to investigators shortly after his arrest that he committed the crime, but the confession was thrown out because he did not have a lawyer present as he had requested.

The evidence at trial included DNA from Jessica‘s blood and Couey‘s semen on a mattress in his bedroom, as well as Jessica‘s fingerprints in a closet in the trailer.

Couey had previously been arrested in 1991 on a charge of fondling a child. In 1978, he was accused of grabbing a girl in her bedroom, placing his hand over her mouth and kissing her. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in the case but paroled in 1980.

Mark Lunsford, Jessica‘s father, is now working with the group "Stop Child Predators," which advocates for stricter penalties and an integrated nationwide sex offender registry.

"I can‘t get my hands on the guy that murdered my daughter so I‘ve made it my job to make the rest of these sexual offenders and predators‘ lives miserable, as miserable as I can," he said.

-- -- -- --

...and now tell me if any one can say this man should remain alive.

Fortunately, this case is being decided in Florida where they not only have the death penalty but where they also implement it and do not allow for the California style of 20+ years of living and breathing on death row.  We can expect his death penalty sentence to be delivered shortly and his removal from the planet to follow within a reasonable time span.

Susan

Lawrence Singleton, despised rapist, dies

He chopped off teenager's arms in 1978

Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer 

Tuesday, January 1, 2002

Lawrence Singleton, who wrote his own unique chapter in the annals of depravity when he chopped off the forearms of California teenager Mary Vincent after raping her, has died of cancer in a Florida prison hospital.

Singleton, who was 74, had been transferred to the hospital from Florida's death row at the North Florida Reception Center, where he was awaiting execution for the 1997 murder of a 31-year-old prostitute in his Tampa home. He died on Friday.

'He had a deeply ingrained hatred and dislike of women,' said Assistant Attorney General Scott Browne, who represented Florida in Singleton's appeal of his death sentence. The Florida Supreme upheld the sentence last year, rejecting the claim that he didn't get a fair trial because of notoriety from the California crime.

Notorious was something of an understatement -- Singleton was reviled in California. And his victim, Mary Vincent, has spent the past 23 years in a series of nightmares, worried that some day Singleton would find her and the whole thing would start over.

'She had a constant fear of her life from Lawrence Singleton,' said Mark E. Edwards, the California attorney who once represented Vincent.

As well she should have. After testifying against Singleton, Vincent, still a teenager, had to walk past him in the courtroom as he sat with his lawyer. He whispered something to her. She suddenly turned pale and fled the courtroom.

Later, she told a prosecutor Singleton had said, 'I'll finish this job if it takes me the rest of my life.'

Nonetheless, 20 years later, Vincent volunteered to come out of her sporadic hiding to testify in the death penalty phase of Singleton's Florida trial.

Asked what happened to her on Del Puerto Canyon Road in California, she said, 'I was attacked, I was raped, and my hands were cut off. He left me to die.' Then she lifted one of her prosthetic arms, pointed it at Singleton and identified him to the jury.

The murder of Roxanne Hayes was covered by the national press largely because of Singleton's near-homicidal mayhem that took place after a car ride between Berkeley and rural Stanislaus County on Sept. 29, 1978.

VINCENT'S HORRIFYING ORDEAL

Singleton, at the time a merchant seaman, picked up 15-year-old Vincent in Berkeley and drove her to an isolated area a few miles west of Patterson and not far from Interstate 5.

There he bludgeoned her, then raped her and then used a hatchet to chop off her arms just below the elbows. Then he dragged her down into a culvert, where he left her, apparently thinking she would die from the trauma he had just inflicted on her body. And, besides, as investigators later deduced from Singleton's crude modus operandi, if she had no hands, it would be difficult to identify her from fingerprints.

But she didn't die. She managed to get out of the culvert and started walking toward the distant noise of I-5 traffic, her bloody stumps hanging down from her shoulders. People in the first car that saw her were so horrified they turned around and fled. People in the second car stopped and got her to a hospital.

CONVICTED IN 1979

In March 1979, a San Diego jury convicted Singleton of kidnaping, mayhem, attempted murder, forcible rape, sodomy and forced oral copulation.

Singleton was so notorious in California for his singular act that when he was paroled to Contra Costa County in 1987, after serving a bit more than half of his 14-year prison sentence, town after town refused to allow him to settle there and he finally served out his parole in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin prison. Singleton moved to Florida shortly after that.

For Mary Vincent, it didn't matter that he was 3,000 miles away. As long as he was somewhere, she was terrified.

She moved to Washington state and married a landscape designer in 1987, but that marriage did not last more than three years. She was so paralyzed with fear that she had difficulty leaving her home for routine errands. Eventually, she moved into an derelict gas station near Tacoma. Then she became anorexic, her weight plunging to below 100 pounds.

VICTIM'S LIFE CHANGED

In the late 1990s, she moved to Orange County and got a job clerking in the local district attorney's office, where she eventually met investigator Tom Wilson, whom she later married. Stable in her new job and marriage, she became more outgoing and formed the Mary Vincent Foundation to help victims of traumatic crime.

'When (Singleton) was incarcerated,' said Richard Breshears, assistant sheriff of Stanislaus County and the lead investigator into the case in 1978, 'she changed dramatically, from someone who looked like she was at death's door to someone who began experiencing life and looking robust.'

'This,' he said of Singleton's death, 'kind of seals the deal for her.'

Recently, according to friends, she got divorced and moved back up to Washington, settling in the Seattle area. Attempts to reach her yesterday were unavailing.

---

Singleton's sordid trail

-- Sept. 29, 1978 -- Lawrence Singleton kidnaps hitchhiker Mary Vincent, 15,

from Berkeley, drives her to rural Stanislaus County, then rapes her and chops off her forearms with a hatchet.

-- Oct. 9, 1978 -- Singleton is arrested in Sparks, Nev.

-- March 29, 1979 -- Singleton is convicted by a San Diego jury of multiple counts and is sentenced to more than 14 years in prison.

-- April 25, 1987 -- Singleton is paroled from California state prison in San Luis Obispo after serving just over half of his sentence. A furor erupts in Contra Costa County after many towns refuse to allow Singleton to settle there. State officials eventually settle him in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin State Prison.

-- April 1988 -- Singleton, released from parole, leaves San Quentin, and begins to roam around the East Bay, living part of the time in Richmond.

-- Sept. 14, 1990 -- Singleton, now living in Tampa, Fla., is released from jail after serving 48 days for petty theft.

-- Feb. 19, 1997 -- Roxanne Hayes, a 31-year-old prostitute and mother of three, is stabbed to death in Singleton's Tampa, Fla., home, nine days after Singleton is released from a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide. A sheriff's deputy, knocking on Singleton's door, finds him in blood-spattered shirt, Hayes' bloody corpse lying on the floor nearby.

-- April 14, 1998 -- Singleton is sentenced to die after a Tampa jury convicts him of first-degree murder in Hayes' death.

-- Dec. 28, 2001 -- Singleton, 74, dies of cancer in a Florida prison hospital.

 

You can not take one case and apply it to the entire nation, although this goes on all the time. Laws are even made because of single cases! There are over 2 billion people in the United States. I pray for your healing non the less. I also pray for all the Nazi like Americans that take pleasure in other peoples suffering to suffer 100 fold for their cruelty.

...who needs to read on? 2 billion people in the United States??? Look what happens when I go out of town for a few days. The country suddenly has a fertility surge with 1.7 billion new babies? Or were there 1.7 billion new immigrants? Combination of the two? Whaddever, I guess it must be true what's been claimed for a long long time -- the United States is was far from overpopulated. Even with the 2 billion now sharing space in the USA, I haven't noticed any crowding. Seems almost like it did when there were 300,000,000 of us a few days ago.

I haven't read past that point but will try. Without a paragraph break words begin to look like unedited streams of consciousness or worse -- a rant. But perhaps there are gems within those many words and I will seek them out. Perhaps I'll learn something as startling as the current population explosion in my country.

Susan

...I thought the women and "sexual addition" was a typo but then I link to the joedork website and see it there again. Almost verbatim too but with paragraphs. Almost looks like a cut and paste. I'm learning too much too fast but I'm making connections. If there is a female sexual addition there must be a sexual subtraction too. Two million people in prison in Texas? What's the population there -- must be at least a half a billion in which case two million in prison isn't too bad. Hopefully some of those prisoners were actually guilty. Anyway, there's altogether too much math in these posts and links. I'm out.

...just when I thought I was out, they puuuuuuuull me back in.  Statistics and numbers do interest me.  Here's what I found from the Justice Policy Institute website regarding the number of prisoners incarcerated in Texas...