Legal News

Supreme Court denies Kevin Cooper's appeal

By Richard Binder

Turns out those professors were right:  Kevin Cooper lost his last appeal yesterday when the Supreme Court refused to hear his case.

Cooper's lawyers failed to convince the justices that there were still doubts about his being the killer and whether authorities tampered with evidence. After the 9th Circuit granted a stay of execution in 2004, forensic tests were performed on the evidence and failed to exonerate Cooper.  The 9th Circuit refused a request for additional testing.

The Supreme Court affirmed that ruling.

Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson says Cooper and his legal team can continue to investigate his case to potentially uncover new evidence on which to base a new appeal. Meanwhile, the death penalty is on hold in California and has been since 2006 when U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that lethal injection might be exposing condemned inmates to cruel and unusual punishment if the first dose of the three-drug sequence failed to fully anesthetize.

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Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on December 01, 2009 (boomark / email).