To kickoff Black History Month, we had a special opportunity to have a conversation about cops, justice, and black communities with Kevin Cooper and Gary Tyler. The event is part of our Kappa Konvos series and we collaborated with Prof. Robert Scheer’s Media & Society class.
It was a truly informative and empowering event, thank you to all those who attended and we hope the wisdom and knowledge that was shared was inspiring. We hope everyone gained something valuable from this experience and use what they learned to make a difference in our world.
Kevin Cooper was convicted of a 1983 quadruple murder and is a death row inmate currently held in California's San Quentin Prison. He came within 3 hours and 42 minutes of being killed by the state of California via lethal injection in February of 2004. He was strapped down to a gurney and placed in what he calls a “death chamber waiting room” and stripped of all his clothes before he was granted a stay of execution. He was 3 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 42 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘴 away from being poisoned to death.
Key information that would have exonerated him was withheld from the defense. Subsequently, his legal team has been working towards an innocence investigation for him. The tests are ongoing and both Gov. Jerry Brown and Gov. Gavin Newsom have ordered modern DNA test that were not available at that time of the murder. In recent years Kevin has taught himself to paint and he has had exhibitions in Europe and New York. He also writes a column for Truthdig, a news website created by USC Annenberg’s Prof. Robert Scheer.
Gary Tyler spent 42 years locked up in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. He had spent his first nine years in solitary confinement, initially on death row. At age 16, Tyler was framed up on charges of killing a Caucasian youth during a racist attack on a busload of Black high school students who were part of a desegregation program in Destrehan, Louisiana. Tyler was convicted of murder by an all-white jury in 1975 and sentenced to death. At 17, he was the youngest person on death row in the United States. Over decades, Tyler unequivocally maintained his innocence. He was released on April 29th 2016. He will was also on our panel of speakers for the event.
