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| Two-year execution break could end in 2 months |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 12/22/2003 |
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California's first condemned inmate to obtain post-conviction DNA testing could be executed as early as February, a state prosecutor said last Monday. Kevin Cooper, convicted of murdering three family members and a guest at their Chino Hills home after escaping from a nearby prison in 1983, would become the 11th inmate executed since capital punishment resumed in California in 1978. The state incarcerates about 650 condemned inmates. Dane Gillette, California's chief death penalty prosecutor, said authorities will ask a judge to order a February execution, barring last-minute appeals. Cooper's appeals, now exhausted, have meandered through the courts for years, and one of his latest battles challenged the sufficiency of a DNA analysis, which showed he was the killer. The testing of his DNA against that found at the crime scene was granted last year by Attorney General Bill Lockyer's office for the first time under a new California law. DNA testing was not available to hundreds of condemned California inmates at trial because it either was not available, technology at the time was inadequate or the scientific community disagreed on its accuracy. Cooper, 45, was convicted in 1985 and sentenced to death for the murders of Douglas and Peggy Ryen, both 41, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and her 11-year-old friend, Christopher Hughes. The June 4, 1983, killings in Chino Hills occurred three days after Cooper escaped from the nearby California Institution for Men, where he had been serving a burglary sentence. The victims were stabbed and hacked repeatedly with a hatchet and knife. The Ryens' 8-year-old son, Joshua, had his throat slit but survived. Cooper eluded authorities for two months but was arrested July 30, 1983, in Santa Barbara, living on a boat as a deckhand. The last California execution was in January 2002. |
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