Four people including a 200-pound former Marine, killed by one man with a hatchet, an ice pick and one or two knives. but wait it gets even more fantastic:
...countless anomalies in the case. Cooper's blood showed up on a beige T-shirt apparently left by a murderer near the scene, but that blood turned out to have a preservative in it — the kind of preservative used by police when they keep blood in test tubes.
Then a forensic scientist found that a sample from the test tube of Cooper's blood held by police actually contained blood from more than one person. That leads Cooper's defense team and Fletcher to believe that someone removed blood and then filled the tube back to the top with someone else's blood.
The police also ignored other suspects. A woman and her sister told police that a housemate, a convicted murderer who had completed his sentence, had shown up with several other people late on the night of the murders, wearing blood-spattered overalls and driving a station wagon similar to the one stolen from the murdered family.
They said that the man was no longer wearing the beige T-shirt he had on earlier in the evening — the same kind as the one found near the scene. And his hatchet, which resembled the one found near the bodies, was missing from his tool area. The account was supported by a prison confession and by witnesses who said they saw a similar group in blood-spattered clothes in a nearby bar that night. The women gave the bloody overalls to the police for testing, but the police, by now focused on Cooper, threw the overalls in the trash.
This case is a travesty. It underscores the central pitfall of capital punishment: No system is fail-safe. How can we be about to execute a man when even some of America's leading judges believe he has been framed?
Lanny Davis, who was the White House counsel for President Bill Clinton, is representing Cooper pro bono. He laments: "The media and the bar have gone deaf and silent on Kevin Cooper. My simple theory: Heinous brutal murder of white family and black convict. Simple as that."
That's a disgrace that threatens not only the life of one man, but the honor of our judicial system. More
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