Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper
Kevin Cooper was convicted of the brutal murders of a Chino Hills, California family and a young houseguest in 1985 and has been on death row at San Quentin ever since. In his new explosive expose, SCAPEGOAT, investigative journalist J. Patrick O'Connor reveals how the sheriff's office and the district attorney's office of San Bernardino County framed Cooper for these horrific murders.

Two days before the murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, Cooper escaped from a nearby prison and holed up in a vacant house 125 yards below the murdered family's hilltop house. Two days after the San Bernardino sheriff's department established that Cooper had been hiding there, it locked in on him as the lone assailant despite numerous eye witness reports that implicated three, young white men as the perpetrators.

From that day forward, four days after the murders were discovered, the sheriff's department discarded information that pointed at other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that exculpated Cooper, and planted evidence that implicated him.

The justice system has failed him at almost every turn in his long, drawn-out appeal process O'Connor said If it were not for a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper - with no appeals remaining - would have been executed by now. The moratorium is expected to remain in place until at least the beginning of 2013.

SCAPEGOAT provides a rare direct examination of the broken justice system in the United States where homicide detectives and district attorneys all too often become blinded by their goal of winning convictions rather than searching for justice for both the victims and the accused. The Kevin Cooper case, as Judge William Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, is a prime example of justice gone begging.

At Gonzaga University School of Law on April 12, 2010, Judge Fletcher delivered a lecture on the subject of the death penalty, in which he said that the problems with the administration of the death penalty are widespread. To illustrate he cited the Kevin Cooper case, stating The case I am about to describe is horrible in many ways. The murders were horrible. Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be - and in my view probably is - innocent. And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department framed him.

The miscarriage of justice means Kevin Cooper has now spent half of his life on death row for a crime he had nothing to do with. He will be scheduled to die by lethal injection once executions are allowed to resume in California. He is, in a word, a scapegoat.

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Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper
Kevin Cooper was convicted of the brutal murders of a Chino Hills, California family and a young houseguest in 1985 and has been on death row at San Quentin ever since. In his new explosive expose, SCAPEGOAT, investigative journalist J. Patrick O'Connor reveals how the sheriff's office and the district attorney's office of San Bernardino County framed Cooper for these horrific murders.

Two days before the murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, Cooper escaped from a nearby prison and holed up in a vacant house 125 yards below the murdered family's hilltop house. Two days after the San Bernardino sheriff's department established that Cooper had been hiding there, it locked in on him as the lone assailant despite numerous eye witness reports that implicated three, young white men as the perpetrators.

From that day forward, four days after the murders were discovered, the sheriff's department discarded information that pointed at other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that exculpated Cooper, and planted evidence that implicated him.

The justice system has failed him at almost every turn in his long, drawn-out appeal process O'Connor said If it were not for a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper - with no appeals remaining - would have been executed by now. The moratorium is expected to remain in place until at least the beginning of 2013.

SCAPEGOAT provides a rare direct examination of the broken justice system in the United States where homicide detectives and district attorneys all too often become blinded by their goal of winning convictions rather than searching for justice for both the victims and the accused. The Kevin Cooper case, as Judge William Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, is a prime example of justice gone begging.

At Gonzaga University School of Law on April 12, 2010, Judge Fletcher delivered a lecture on the subject of the death penalty, in which he said that the problems with the administration of the death penalty are widespread. To illustrate he cited the Kevin Cooper case, stating The case I am about to describe is horrible in many ways. The murders were horrible. Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be - and in my view probably is - innocent. And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department framed him.

The miscarriage of justice means Kevin Cooper has now spent half of his life on death row for a crime he had nothing to do with. He will be scheduled to die by lethal injection once executions are allowed to resume in California. He is, in a word, a scapegoat.

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Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper

Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper

by J Patrick Cooper
Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper

Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper

by J Patrick Cooper

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Overview

Kevin Cooper was convicted of the brutal murders of a Chino Hills, California family and a young houseguest in 1985 and has been on death row at San Quentin ever since. In his new explosive expose, SCAPEGOAT, investigative journalist J. Patrick O'Connor reveals how the sheriff's office and the district attorney's office of San Bernardino County framed Cooper for these horrific murders.

Two days before the murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, Cooper escaped from a nearby prison and holed up in a vacant house 125 yards below the murdered family's hilltop house. Two days after the San Bernardino sheriff's department established that Cooper had been hiding there, it locked in on him as the lone assailant despite numerous eye witness reports that implicated three, young white men as the perpetrators.

From that day forward, four days after the murders were discovered, the sheriff's department discarded information that pointed at other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that exculpated Cooper, and planted evidence that implicated him.

The justice system has failed him at almost every turn in his long, drawn-out appeal process O'Connor said If it were not for a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper - with no appeals remaining - would have been executed by now. The moratorium is expected to remain in place until at least the beginning of 2013.

SCAPEGOAT provides a rare direct examination of the broken justice system in the United States where homicide detectives and district attorneys all too often become blinded by their goal of winning convictions rather than searching for justice for both the victims and the accused. The Kevin Cooper case, as Judge William Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, is a prime example of justice gone begging.

At Gonzaga University School of Law on April 12, 2010, Judge Fletcher delivered a lecture on the subject of the death penalty, in which he said that the problems with the administration of the death penalty are widespread. To illustrate he cited the Kevin Cooper case, stating The case I am about to describe is horrible in many ways. The murders were horrible. Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be - and in my view probably is - innocent. And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department framed him.

The miscarriage of justice means Kevin Cooper has now spent half of his life on death row for a crime he had nothing to do with. He will be scheduled to die by lethal injection once executions are allowed to resume in California. He is, in a word, a scapegoat.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781467526647
Publisher: Strategic Media Books
Publication date: 01/10/2012
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

J. Patrick O'Connor was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1944. He graduated from the University of Missouri - Columbia in 1967 with a degree in English Literature. He was a reporter for United Press International in Portland, Oregon and Kansas City and he was UPI bureau manager in Topeka, Kansas.

He was the editor of Cincinnati Magazine, an associate editor of TV Guide, and the editor and publisher on the Kansas City New Times, an alternative weekly. In 1998, he and J.J. Maloney founded the Internet site Crime Magazine.

In 2008, Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press, published his book, The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal. In 2012, Strategic Media Books published his second book, Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper. Since 1997, he has been working to establish the innocence of five innocent people convicted and sentenced to life without parole in the 1988 deaths of six Kansas City firefighters and is currently at work on a book about that case.

He has been a guest speaker on the subject of our broken justice system at Santa Clara University School of Law, Southwestern School of Law - Los Angeles, Golden State University School of Law - San Francisco, Merritt College - Oakland, California, University of Pacifica McGeorge School of Law - Sacramento, Baruch College - City University of New York, City University of New York Graduate School, Trinity College - Hartford Connecticut, Central Connecticut State University - New Britain, Connecticut, and Wesleyan University - Middletown, Connecticut.

He has lived in Naples, Florida since 2001

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