On Friday afternoon, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he signed an executive order to launch an independent probe in the case of a death row inmate whose quadruple murder conviction has been questioned for more than three decades.
The investigation is in response to a clemency request from Kevin Cooper, 63, a black man who was sentenced to death for the 1983 killings of Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their ten-year-old daughter Jessica, and Christopher Hughes, an 11-year-old unrelated house guest. According to the Los Angeles Times, “they were found hacked and slashed to death in a Chino Hills home…stabbed a total of 143 times with an ice pick, an ax and a knife.”
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