California Gets Ready To Kill Kevin Cooper and He May Be Innocent!

California is planning to kill Kevin Cooper, (pic) and once again we are confronted with the dilemma that he may be "actually innocent."

The LA Times has this story about Mr. Cooper and his long, crazy road to gurney. 

The murders Kevin Cooper stands convicted for are horrible:  4 members of the Chino Hills, California Ryan family all stabbed or hacked to death allegedly by this one man; but there is a some compelling reasons to believe that he may not have been the perpetrator or perpetrators.  Astonishingly, 11 federal judges and five of he original jurors are trying to stop the execution, here's what the LAT has to say:

"[Twenty-six] years [after Kevin Cooper's conviction], the legal hurdles to [his] execution have been surmounted. With the Supreme Court's decision last month not to review his claim of innocence, the 52-year-old becomes only the sixth of California's 697 death row prisoners cleared for lethal injection once a federal judge approves revised procedures.


But the exhaustion of Cooper's legal recourse hasn't silenced supporters who claim he was the victim of corrupt law enforcement and stunning bad luck.

The opponents of capital punishment who have long clung to puzzling clues and hints of police misconduct have been joined by a prison warden, 11 federal judges and five jurors now bothered by allegations that Cooper was framed.

'The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man,' Judge William A. Fletcher of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in an impassioned dissent from the last review upholding Cooper's conviction. Deputies, he said, 'manipulated and planted evidence in order to convict Cooper' and 'discounted, disregarded, and discarded evidence pointing to other killers.'"

This case is so disturbing. The positions--of those in favor of moving forward with the execution of Cooper and those opposed to his execution--are at polar extremes.  The perpetrator(s) of Ryan family murders committed heinous acts, but was it Kevin Cooper?   There is a lot of reason to believe the crimes were committed by several men, uh the surviving child originally indicated three white men, (revenge killings by a drug gang on the wrong house?)  So why is California intent on killing Cooper? 

I guess, somebody's gonna get it and it might as well be this crazy, black guy!