accusations of planted evidence and alternate suspects who were never pursued. cooper also appealed to governor schwarzenegger for clemency. for the clemency petition, a number of jurors came forward and said they were very uncomfortable. now that they had learned about the things that surfaced since the trial. peggy, ryen s sister even wrote a letter to the governor saying they believe kevin was not the killer and they should not execute him. ten days before the execution, governor schwarzenegger made his decision. arnold schwarzenegger made his first live or die decision as california governor. he rejected pleas to spare the life of a convicted killer. he said that kevin was clearly guilty and should be executed. a few days before, the execution date, the california supreme court denied our request for a
also changed drastically. at the original trial, the trgs t-shirt was only shown to have doug ryen s blood it. when the t-shirt was tested, at this time, there was additional blood located on the upper part of the t-shirt across the chest. it was previous to this time. cooper s defense argued that the new blood on the t-shirt and the newly discovered blood found on a-41 only could have come from one place. the vial of cooper s blood that lab technician daniel gregonas had access to. the vial was taken to an independent lab for analysis. it was discovered that the vile of kevin cooper s blood contained two different blood types and two different dna types indicating without any doubt that additional blood from another person had been poured into the cooper s vile. the likelihood is that they
a paint brush and went like this. it was splattered everywhere. their feet were sticking to the floor. they were so inundated with blood. at the time, we didn t know about the murder and we just thought, well, i don t know what they ve been doing, slaughtering pigs or whatever. but we re out of here. she never reported the incident because she claimed a uniform sheriff s deputy was at the bar that night and she assumed he would follow up. in 2004, norm hile fought for a new trial for kevin cooper in front of u.s. district judge marilyn huff in san diego. in his appeal, hile presented christine s testimony and, to his surprise, the state responded by inadvertently revealing a previously unknown piece of evidence provided by a
dna testing which could exonerate cooper. kevin cooper kept saying, i m not guilty. do dna testing now that you can do it. if it shows that i am guilty, you can go ahead and execute me. i walkered out of there thinking, whoa, they ve really got a case i need to think about. san bernardino s current district attorney michael ramos was handling cooper s appeals. we felt that the ongoing requests by defense counsel in this case was just another delay tactic. there was no evidence at all that anybody but kevin cooper committed these horrendous murders. none. but in the early 2000s, new legislation in california would grant kevin cooper the right to dna testing. all these years that my case was in the appeals crt,
never got a fair hand. would always get denied for one reason or the next. i felt very bad, very discouraged until dna testing came along and i had a shot. the state would perform dna tests on blood sample a-41 and blood on the tan shirt thought to be thrown from the stolen station wagon. the results would determine whether kevin cooper lived or died. (jessica) i love beneful healthy weight because the first ingredient is chicken. (riley) man, this chicken is spectacular! (jessica) i feel like when he eats beneful, he turns into a puppy again. you love it, don t you? you love it so much! (vo) try beneful healthy weight with chicken. with real chicken as the number one ingredient.