June 11, 2012

The Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa was the world’s most famous and valuable painting, yet its security depended on four ordinary hooks and the locked door of the museum – the Louvre in Paris – where it was on display. All that would be needed to take it down from the wall and to carry it off was a pair of strong arms.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

The streets of Paris were already hot but still silent on this summer morning just before eight. It was Monday, August 21. The year was 1911.

A few drunk revelers – men, their handlebar mustaches wet with perspiration, and women of low repute, necklaces of fake rubies and emeralds adorning their half-exposed ample bosoms – stood on the sidewalks outside the Folies Bergère music hall and the Moulin Rouge cabaret waiting for taxicabs – horse-drawn carriages – to come by and to take them home.

Elsewhere in Paris, burly concierges were sweeping the sidewalks in front of the buildings in their charge. Halting for a few minutes, they lit foul-smelling Gaullois cigarettes and shouted greetings across the streets to one another. 

Mondays were closing days for small family-owned shops, those which were open on Sundays, but the big stores of La Samaritaine, Galaries Lafayette and Le Bon Marché would be opening and pretty salesgirls were already at that hour emerging from Métro (the underground rail system) stations for a 10-hour working day.

The Louvre museum was also closed. Always open on a Sunday, Monday was the day the museum was being cleaned. Cleaners would polish its wooden floors, delicately dust the paintings hanging on the walls and wipe off the oily finger marks which had been left by admiring visitors on the glass display cases. It was also a day for repairs when the maintenance staff, dressed in white smocks so that they could be told apart from the lowly cleaners, who wore blue aprons, would change light bulbs, repair leaking faucets, or replace hooks on a painting. There would also be banging both inside and outside the building because an elevator, a new element in the capital’s Haussmannian buildings, was being installed and scaffolding covered part of the building.

Monday was also the day the Louvre’s official photographers, also dressed in white smocks, took paintings down from the walls to carry them to a studio elsewhere on the premises in order to photograph them for the museum’s archives.

It was, in fact, a busy day in the Louvre, once a residence of France’s monarchs but for the previous 117 years a museum visited each day by several hundred people, not all of them Parisians or even French, but foreign art lovers who had come to Paris on slow trains or slow ships. Air travel was still something of the future.

Jan. 30, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from the recently released book Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper by J. Patrick O’Connor, editor of Crime Magazine.  Published in January of 2012 by Strategic Media Books, Scapegoat is available at www.strategicmediabooks.com, Amazon.com, barnesandoble.com and other book sellers throughout the United States. Scapegoat won Silver in the 2013 Independent Publishers Book Awards for True Crime.

 by J. Patrick O’Connor

Foreword

During the fall of 2008, I was in the San Francisco Bay area on a book tour for The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal.  The tour was arranged by Jeff Mackler, the executive director of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, and it involved about fifteen speaking engagements at different venues.   Jeff told me that supporters of death-row inmate Kevin Cooper – whom I had not heard of -- would be attending a number of these presentations, and that they would be asking me to write a book about Kevin’s case.  Indeed, two of Cooper’s most dedicated supporters, Carole Seligman and Rebecca Doran, did just that. 

Cooper had been convicted in 1985 of the brutal murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their ten-year-old daughter, Jessica, and eleven-year-old houseguest Christopher Hughes, and the attempted murder of the Ryens’ eight-year-old son Joshua. 

Jeff had gotten to know Cooper over the years, and had visited him about twenty times. Kevin’s case was quite different from Mumia’s, he said, in the sense that Mumia is essentially a political prisoner and Kevin was anything but. 

When I decided to begin researching the Kevin Cooper case in early 2009, I had no pre-conceived notions about his guilt or innocence.  Each case is different, radically so.  My first step was to read and notate the trial transcripts, documents of over eight-thousand pages.  I then read all the police reports, witness interviews and various newspaper accounts.  Finally, I read all of the appeals and the judicial rulings.  By this time I was ready to begin interviewing various people involved in Cooper’s trial and his subsequent appeals. 

One problem in researching a crime nearly twenty-five years after it occurred is that a number of key people involved in the investigation and trial have passed away or have retired or have simply forgotten important factual details.  Another obstacle is that, because Cooper technically still has appeals open to him, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office refused to discuss the case.

During the summer of 2009, I made arrangements to interview Kevin Cooper in a visitor’s cell on death row at San Quentin.  On several issues, particularly those regarding his criminal record previous to the Chino Hills trial, I found him protective and less than forthcoming.  That was all behind him, he seemed to suggest.

On the other hand, I was taken by his equanimity and his resolve to prove he was wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Chino Hills murders.  I could see that the many years he had spent on death row, instead of diminishing him, had turned him into a person worthy of the high regard that his supporters – and his attorneys at the Orrick law firm – felt for him.  On death row, Kevin Cooper had finally grown up. 

Contrary to popular belief, most of the nation’s more than three-thousand-five-hundred death row inmates do not profess innocence.  In fact, unlike Kevin Cooper, very few do.  For those who do, the road to exoneration is a long, slow trek that usually fails.  But it does succeed occasionally.  Since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions, one-hundred-thirty-six death-row inmates have been exonerated.  In the majority of those cases, the proof of the inmate’s innocence was so convincing that the prosecutor dropped the charges rather than retry the case.  In forty-five cases where there was a retrial, the inmate was acquitted. 

There are two things that do link the Mumia Abu-Jamal and Kevin Cooper cases: Each was prosecuted by a district attorney’s office hell bent on winning a death-penalty conviction; and neither defendant received a proper defense.  What separates the two cases is that, while Mumia’s trial was a mockery of the justice system’s standards for a fair trial, Cooper’s trial had the trappings of fairness – but was lost long before the trial opened.  Two pre-trial developments caused this outcome: The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department destroyed evidence that could have exonerated Cooper; and his public defender insisted on going it alone.  Not many Davids actually slay Goliaths. 

This then is a book about a gruesome murder case, painfully recounted; all quotes are from either documents or interviews I conducted doing my research.  It is also a book about how justice can go astray.  It is the true story of the Chino Hills murders, and the prosecution of Kevin Cooper, a prisoner who escaped once too often and found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Since 1985, he has been on death row at San Quentin asserting his innocence in failed-after-failed appeal while awaiting his execution. 

December 6, 2002 Updated: June 7, 2013

Nancy Smith, center, with her four teenage children.

 The ritual abuse hysteria that swept across the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s resulted in hundreds of innocent people being wrongfully convicted of committing a bizarre concoction of sexual acts on preschoolers. Most of those convicted were eventually freed from prison on appeal, but some innocent people remain behind bars. One of the most blatant cases of wrongful conviction occurred in Lorain, Ohio. There a politically ambitious prosecutor's office coaxed and manipulated a few Head Start preschoolers into testifying that they had been sexually abused repeatedly over a six-month period by their bus driver and some stranger -- two people who never even knew each other, but were sentenced to life for crimes that never occurred in the first place.

by Lona Manning

Bulletin: For Nancy Smith, her long legal odyssey ended June 4, 2013 in an Elyria courtroom where a judge released her for time already served. Instead of the vindication she had steadfastly fought for since her 1994 conviction on child molestation charges, she surrendered her rights to any further appeals to clear her name of the wrongful conviction she was subjected to at the hands of misguided and overzealous Lorain, Ohio prosecutors.

To avoid the possibility of being sent back to prison, she accepted a deal worked out between her attorneys and Lorain prosecutors that sentenced her to 12 years in prison but gave her credit for the 15 years already served since she and co-defendant Joseph Allen were convicted in the Head Start molestation case.

Judge Virgil Sinclair, a retired Stark Count judge appointed by the Ohio Supreme Court to handle Smith’s resentencing, also reduced the rape charges against her to the lesser offense of “gross imposition.”

The resentencing of Allen will take place at a later date. Like Smith, Allen has been free since mid-2009 when Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge acquitted both Smith and Allen when they appeared before him to correct a  minor entencing error.