[Pnews] Kevin Cooper: An Undeniable Truth

Wed Apr 12 20:25:35 EDT 2023

scheerpost.com
<https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/10/kevin-cooper-an-undeniable-truth/>
Kevin Cooper: An Undeniable Truth
April 10, 2023
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The lethal injection <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lethal_injection> room
at San Quentin State Prison
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Quentin_State_Prison>, completed in
2010. CACorrections (California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

*By Kevin Cooper /* *Original to ScheerPost*

As a man of African American descent who has studied and learned the truth
about American history— the real truth about the real history of this
country—I have learned about the death penalty—how it was and continues to
be used and misused on poor and Black people especially.

This is true whether it be initiated by its law enforcement officers at the
front end of this country’s criminal justice system or on the back end by
its state or federal executioners. I have learned these truths through my
personal experience of almost being murdered by the state of California in
2004, when I came within 3 hours and 42 minutes of being tortured to death
by way of lethal injection.

I have become, from learning and experience, an abolitionist, and I am
wholeheartedly against the death penalty in all of its various, heinous and
torturous methods. I say this so that my essay will not be misunderstood by
anyone as I write about what I heard while watching the news about double
murderer Alex Murdaugh’s sentencing in South Carolina.

Here in the divided states of America, a superior court judge who is a
black man said to Alex Murdaugh, who is a white man, that “other people
have been sentenced to death for less” than Murdaugh is being sentenced to
life without parole. What an undeniable truth this is, especially coming
from the mouth of a Black judge who has to know the complete history of the
death penalty in South Carolina.

This is also the truth—that the white man who is the head prosecutor of
that county in South Carolina refused to seek the death penalty for the
once very wealthy Murdaugh, a white man, even though he was charged with
brutally murdering his wife and son. He is also being investigated for
other possible murders.

There is no doubt in my mind that if Alex Murdaugh was a Black man, wealthy
or not, and was charged with murdering a white woman and her son, he would
have been facing the death penalty because that prosecutor would have been
seeking it.

Even if that Black man was charged with murdering his Black wife and son,
the prosecutor would have sought the death penalty. This is a historical
truth about the death penalty in this country and who receives it and who
doesn’t.

I speak to this fact not only from a historical perspective, but from a
personal one as well. As a Black man who is on death row at San Quentin
prison after being convicted of murdering four white people and sentenced
to death by gas chamber, the method of execution at that time in this
state, I have studied the history of lynching and executions in learning
about America’s tortured history.

I have proclaimed my innocence since I was first arrested in 1983, I still
proclaim my innocence 40 years later in 2023, and I will continue to do so
forever. I was sentenced to death in liberal California, but in a
conservative county in San Diego after a change of venue from San
Bernardino, another conservative county. I was sentenced to death because
of the color of my skin and because of the color of the skin of the
victims, as well as the horrific nature of the crime.I understand these
truths, and I understand why Alex Murdaugh was not sentenced to death. His
skin color prevented this, even though his wife and son had the same color
of skin too.

These truths I write have been factually documented; that the race of the
victim(*s*) can be the major factor on who receives the death penalty or
not, along with the race of the accused, and the class of the accused. This
unspoken reality is why Black people represent only 13% of the
population—Black men an even slimmer 7% of people in the US— in this
country yet make up half of the population of death row inmates across this
country

America has never had a problem with giving the death penalty to Black
people as a whole, or Black men in particular, especially in ex-slave
states like South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana, just to name
a few. Yet this same type of thing is happening in this progressive state
of California, where conservative counties send more Black and Latino men
to death row than any of the other counties in this state.

As I alluded to earlier, I am an abolitionist, and I am also a truth teller
in a time when the truth, just like justice, is defined by the people who
are either for it, or against it, no matter what it is.

We can all recognize that life, *real* life, is not fair, and this includes
a place that claims that there is equal justice under the criminal justice
system. We can all recognize that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that
anything unfair can be made to be fair if enough people care to do
something about it. We can do something about this unjust system of state
execution by ending the death penalty in California once and for all.

For that Black judge in South Carolina to state on the court record in
front of a packed courtroom, the TV cameras, prosecutors, and police
officials, that other people have received the death penalty for less than
what Alex Murdaugh received life without parole for, is a hell of a
statement.

It is a statement that we should all learn something from, especially in a
system that has equal justice under law written into it. The culture of
racism in most prosecutors’ offices across this country is obvious, and
hidden at the same time. This contradiction is just as real as the wealthy
white men who mostly run and control this system and its district
attorneys. The very real life and death plight of poor people and Black
people in this country’s criminal justice system compared to that of
wealthy or influential white people like Alex Murdaugh not only speaks to
the institutional racism in this system, but to classism as well. How can
there ever be real justice in a so-called justice system when these never
ending “-isms” won’t go away?

Capital punishment has outlived its time, and the only way for all of us to
have some fairness in this unfair system is to end the death penalty once
and for all!

Here’s another contradiction for you—and yes it’s a historical one as
well—in the segregated south, the only chair that poor white men and poor
black men were allowed to sit in as equals was “’old Sparky,” the electric
chair.
------------------------------

In 1985, Kevin Cooper was convicted of a 1983 quadruple murder and
sentenced to death in a trial in which evidence that might have exonerated
him was withheld or destroyed from the defense. Cooper has become active in
writing from prison to assert his innocence, protest racism in the American
criminal justice system, and oppose the death penalty. His case was
scrutinized by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on Jan. 23, 2021
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/opinion/sunday/kevin-cooper-dna.html>, May
17, 2018
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/17/opinion/sunday/kevin-cooper-california-death-row.html>
 and June 17, 2017
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/17/opinion/sunday/kevin-cooper-death-row-innocent.html?_r=0>,
and by 48 Hours, with Erin Moriarty, most recently on March 21, 2020 in “The
Troubling Case Against Keven Cooper
<https://www.cbsnews.com/video/the-troubling-case-against-kevin-cooper/>.”

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