This is the art of Kevin Cooper, who is currently on death row in California.
One
June day in 1983, a California professor drove over to a neighbor’s
house to pick up his 11-year-old son from a sleepover. Nobody answered
the door, so the professor peered through a window — and saw a ghastly
panorama of blood.
The
professor found his son stabbed to death, along with the bodies of
Peggy and Doug Ryen, the homeowners. The Ryens’ 10-year-old daughter was
also dead, with 46 wounds, but their 8-year-old son was still
breathing.
This
quadruple murder began a travesty that is still unfolding and
underscores just how broken the American justice system is. A man named
Kevin Cooper is on San Quentin’s death row awaiting execution for the
murders, even though a federal judge says he probably is innocent.
“He
is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed
him,” the judge, William A. Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals, declared in a searing 2013 critique delivered in a distinguished lecture series.
Fletcher was in the minority in 2009 when his court refused to rehear the case. His dissent,
over 100 pages long, points to Cooper’s possible innocence and to
systematic police misconduct. It’s a modern equivalent of Émile Zola’s
“J’accuse.”
Click here for the full article.
Source: The New York Times
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