Cooper v. Brown

• Decision Date: 11 May 2009
• Docket Number: No. 05-99004.,05-99004.
• Citation: 565 F.3d 581
• Parties: Kevin COOPER, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Jill BROWN, California State, Prison at San Quentin, Respondent-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

565 F.3d 581

Kevin COOPER, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Jill BROWN, California State, Prison at San Quentin, Respondent-Appellee.

No. 05-99004.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

May 11, 2009.

David T. Alexander, Esquire, Mbv Law, LLP, George Yuhas, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, Ali Kazemi, Esquire, San Francisco, CA, Norman C. Hile, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP, Sacramento, CA, for Petitioner-Appellant.

Holly D. Wilkens, Esquire, Deputy Attorney General, Agca-Office of the California Attorney General, San Diego, CA, for Respondent-Appellee.

D.C. No. CV-04-00656-H, Southern District of California, San Diego.

Before: PAMELA ANN RYMER, M. MARGARET McKEOWN, and RONALD M. GOULD, Circuit Judges.

Dissent by Judge WILLIAM A. FLETCHER; Dissent by Judge WARDLAW; Dissent by Judge FISHER; Dissent by Judge REINHARDT; Concurrence by Judge RYMER.

ORDER

The panel has voted to deny the Petition for Rehearing and Petition for Rehearing En Banc.

The full court was advised of the petition for rehearing en banc. A judge requested a vote on whether to hear the matter en banc. The matter failed to receive a majority of the votes of the nonrecused active judges in favor of en banc consideration. Fed. R.App. P. 35.

The petition for rehearing and the petition for rehearing en banc are DENIED.

WILLIAM A. FLETCHER, Circuit Judge, dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc, joined by PREGERSON, REINHARDT, PAEZ, and RAWLINSON, Circuit Judges:

The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man.

From the time of his initial arrest until today, Kevin Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence of the murders for which he has been convicted. Cooper was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death by a California court in 1985. The California Supreme Court affirmed Cooper's conviction and sentence in 1991. People v. Cooper, 53 Cal.3d 771, 281 Cal.Rptr. 90, 809 P.2d 865 (1991). The California Supreme Court denied Cooper's state petition for habeas corpus in 1996. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit affirmed the denial of Cooper's first federal application for habeas corpus in 2001. Cooper v. Calderon, 255 F.3d 1104 (9th Cir.2001). That decision was called en banc, but the call failed.

In 2004, on the eve of his scheduled execution, Cooper sought permission from the three-judge Ninth Circuit panel to file a second or successive application for federal habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(3)(A). Among other things, Cooper claimed that he had new and previously unavailable evidence that the State had violated Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963). Brady requires the State to turn over exculpatory information to a criminal defendant. Based on the claimed Brady violation, Cooper claimed actual innocence under Schlup v. Delo, 513 U.S. 298, 115 S.Ct. 851, 130 L.Ed.2d 808 (1995), and § 2244(b)(2)(B)(ii). The three-judge panel denied permission, but an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit reversed. Cooper v. Woodford, 358 F.3d 1117 (9th Cir.2004) (en banc). We stayed Cooper's then-pending execution until his new federal habeas application could be addressed.

Two days before the murders, Cooper had escaped from the minimum security section of a nearby California state prison by walking across an open field. Shortly before Cooper's scheduled execution date, Midge Carroll, the now-retired warden of the prison, provided a sworn declaration in which she stated that she had learned from her staff that shoes issued to prisoners "were not prison manufactured or specially designed prison-issue shoes," but, rather, were "common tennis shoes available to the general public through Sears and Roebuck and other such retail stores." Carroll stated that she had learned this information during the investigation and conveyed it to investigators before the trial. This information would have been critical to Cooper's defense, for a key to the prosecution's case at trial was that identical shoeprints at the crime scene and in the house where Cooper had been staying were made by Pro-Ked "Dude" tennis shoes, and that these shoes were distributed only to prisons and other institutions. Warden Carroll's information, though clearly exculpatory, had not been provided to Cooper prior to trial.

In granting permission to file a second or successive application, the en banc panel noted, "Once a Brady violation has been established, a federal habeas court is required to evaluate all information in the case, not just information relevant to the Brady violation." Cooper, 358 F.3d at 1122. That is, everything in the new habeas application was properly before the district court. Woratzeck v. Stewart, 118 F.3d 648, 650 (9th Cir.1997) (per curiam) ("If [a petitioner's] application makes a prima facie showing as to one of the claims, he may proceed upon his entire application in the district court."). In addition to this general instruction to the district court, we specifically directed that two tests be performed. We wrote, "As soon as Cooper's application is filed, [the district court] should promptly order that these two tests be performed in order to evaluate Cooper's claim of innocence." Cooper, 358 F.3d at 1122.

First, we directed the district court to conduct further testing of a bloody tan t-shirt that had been found beside the road leading away from the house where the murders took place. The tan t-shirt was found soon after the murders. Initial testing of stains on the t-shirt showed that they contained blood consistent with one of the victims and not consistent with Cooper. Cooper presented evidence of the t-shirt as part of his defense at trial. 12/6/84 RT 4602-06, 4608; 1/15/85 RT 6508-11.¹

Long after trial, at Cooper's insistence, the State performed a DNA test on some of the blood on the t-shirt. Cooper maintained that the test would prove his innocence. Instead, the blood tested positive for Cooper's DNA. Cooper maintained (and continues to maintain) that his blood was planted on the t-shirt. If the blood was planted, the only possible source was blood taken from Cooper by law enforcement authorities. A vial of blood was taken from Cooper by San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department (SBCSD) personnel on August 1, 1983, two days after his arrest. That blood contained an added preservative called EDTA. We wrote, "The presence of such a preservative would show that [Cooper's] blood was not on the t-shirt at the time of the killings[.]" Cooper, 358 F.3d at 1124. We directed the district court to test Cooper's blood on the t-shirt for the presence of EDTA.

Second, Jessica Ryen, one of the murder victims, was clutching blond or light brown hair in her hand. We directed the district court to subject the hair to mitochondrial DNA testing.

The district court held hearings on Cooper's application for habeas corpus in 2004 and 2005. It denied all relief. Cooper v. Brown ("Dist.Ct."), No. 04-656 (S.D.Cal. May 27, 2005).² A three-judge panel of our court affirmed, with one judge concurring specially. Cooper v. Brown, 510 F.3d 870 (9th Cir.2007).

There is no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing and flouted our direction to perform the two tests.

As will be described in greater detail below, the district court impeded and obstructed Cooper's attorneys at every turn as they sought to develop the record. The court imposed unreasonable conditions on the testing the en banc court directed; refused discovery that should have been available as a matter of course; limited testimony that should not have been limited; and found facts unreasonably, based on a truncated and distorted record.

The most egregious, but by no means the only, example is the testing of Cooper's blood on the t-shirt for the presence of EDTA. As will be described in greater detail below, the district court so interfered with the design of the testing protocol that one of Cooper's scientific experts refused to participate in the testing. The district court allowed the state-designated representative to help choose the samples to be tested from the t-shirt. The court refused to allow Cooper's scientific experts to participate in the choice of samples. Indeed, the court refused to allow Cooper's experts even to see the t-shirt. The state-designated lab obtained a test result showing an extremely high level of EDTA in the sample that was supposed to contain Cooper's blood. If that test result was valid, it showed that Cooper's blood had been planted on the t-shirt, just as Cooper has maintained.

A careful analysis of the evidence before the district court strongly suggests that the result obtained by the state-designated lab was valid. However, the court allowed the state-designated lab to withdraw the test result on the ground of claimed contamination in the lab. The court refused to allow any inquiry into the alleged contamination. The court refused to allow Cooper's experts to review the bench notes of the state-designated lab. The court then refused to allow further testing of the t-shirt, even though such testing was feasible.

The district court placed two photographs of the murder victims at the end of its 159-page order denying relief to Cooper. One is a photograph of the photogenic Ryen family — two beautiful children, ten-year-old brown-haired Jessica and eight-year-old blond-haired Josh, and their attractive parents. The other is a photograph of eleven-year-old Chris Hughes, a handsome blond-haired boy. The district court had no analytic reason to include these photographs at the end of its order.

I. Background

Late at night on June 4, 1983, Doug and Peggy Ryen, their daughter Jessica, and their houseguest Chris Hughes, were brutally murdered in the Ryen home in Chino Hills, California. Their son, eight-year-old Josh, suffered extensive injuries but survived. The victims had numerous chopping, cutting and stabbing injuries, caused by several different kinds of...