Governor Won’t Halt Execution

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday denied clemency to death row inmate Kevin Cooper, who faces execution Feb. 10 for savagely murdering four people in Chino Hills more than two decades ago.

In his first death penalty review, Schwarzenegger said he found no compelling reason to grant clemency even after giving serious consideration to Cooper’s argument that the courts had ignored evidence that might exonerate him.

“I have carefully weighed the claims presented in Kevin Cooper’s plea for clemency,” Schwarzenegger said in a statement released Friday. “The state and federal courts have reviewed this case for more than 18 years. Evidence establishing his guilt is overwhelming, and his conversion to faith and his mentoring of others, while commendable, do not diminish the cruelty and destruction he has inflicted on so many. His is not a case for clemency.”

The governor also said the brutal nature of the crimes, and Cooper’s long history of violence, outweighed any arguments for mercy.

Two days after Cooper escaped from state prison in Chino in June 1983, he broke into the home of Douglas and Peggy Ryen and used a hatchet, knife and ice pick to kill them as well as their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old house guest, Christopher Hughes. 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 rescued. He survived and later testified against Cooper.

Schwarzenegger, who supports the death penalty and is a strong advocate of victims’ rights, said he considered the views of the Ryen and Hughes families, as well as those from citizens who wrote letters expressing their opinion.

“This shows he took into consideration what the long legal process has put our families through,” said Mary Ann Hughes, mother of Christopher Hughes. Schwarzenegger “didn’t let himself become blinded by the things that had no basis. Everything the defense has to appeal now has already been heard by courts.”

Cooper’s defense attorneys already have filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and said they will aggressively pursue a stay of execution so a judge can review their allegations of police misconduct and evidence-tampering. They noted that six members of the jury that convicted Cooper also have raised concerns and support delaying the execution.

“It is quite disappointing that Gov. Schwarzenegger chose to omit specific examples of evidence suggesting Kevin Cooper’s innocence,” said Lanny Davis, a former special counsel to the Clinton administration who is now assisting with Cooper’s defense. “Why wouldn’t he at least give Kevin Cooper the dignity of responding to those issues? Maybe he didn’t even read what we sent to him. He utterly ignored everything we sent to him. His basic fairness instincts were lost.”

San Bernardino County Dist. Atty. Michael Ramos said the governor’s decision brings the victims’ families “a step closer” to justice.

“I think this means Kevin Cooper is going to die,” said Milt Silverman Jr., Josh Ryen’s attorney and a veteran San Diego County defense lawyer. “His guilt is overwhelming.... This was a murder scene of great sustained violence, more gruesome than the most violent movies. Hollywood could never do justice to this ugliness.”

Cooper, 46, admits that he broke out of a minimum security area of the Chino state prison on June 2, 1983, and that he spent two nights in an unoccupied house near the Ryens’ home.

Cooper has maintained that he hitchhiked out of the area on the night of the murders, June 4, and that he was not involved in the killings.

However, police found prints of prison-issue shoes inside the Ryen home and on a spa cover outside the master bedroom. They also found a rope with Douglas Ryen’s blood in the neighbor’s house where Cooper had been hiding. Other DNA-tested evidence found in the Ryen home also tied Cooper to the murders.

In the bid for clemency, Cooper’s attorneys argued that evidence that could clear their client has never been investigated, including: blond hairs clutched in Jessica Ryen’s hand -- Cooper’s hair is black; an alleged confession to the murders by an inmate of a mental facility; and a statement by a woman who said her boyfriend came home with bloody coveralls on the night of the murders.

Cooper’s attorneys also enlisted the support of some celebrities, including actors Denzel Washington, Sean Penn and Anjelica Huston, who signed a letter urging Schwarzenegger to postpone Cooper’s execution.

“There are too many unanswered questions about the evidence in this case, and until those questions are answered, there is no reason to rush to kill Kevin Cooper,” Davis said.

Schwarzenegger said he thoroughly reviewed those arguments and was unconvinced. He also dismissed allegations that law enforcement officials may have doctored evidence to convict Cooper: “There are not facts that lead me to believe this claim has any merit.”

Republican Ronald Reagan, in 1967, became the last California governor to grant clemency to a condemned murderer, a brain-damaged man named Calvin Thomas, who had firebombed the home of his girlfriend in Los Angeles, killing her 8-year-old son. Reagan commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. His predecessor, Democrat Pat Brown, commuted 23 death sentences and allowed 36 executions to occur. Under Reagan, only one execution was carried out.

Cooper would be the 11th man executed in California since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978. The last state execution was that of another convicted killer from San Bernardino County, Stephen Wayne Anderson, 48, on Jan. 28, 2002.

On Tuesday, opponents to Cooper’s execution by lethal injection will hold vigils. The “Statewide Day of Action Against the Execution of Kevin Cooper” will include news conferences pleading for his life.

Times staff writer Carl Ingram contributed to this report