Punishing With Life Instead of Death?

Were we about to execute the wrong guy?

Hard to say.

As death row cases go, convicted killer Kevin Cooper has neither the strongest nor the weakest claim of innocence I’ve seen.

Cooper, who got a temporary reprieve Monday just as his needle was being prepared, was convicted of using a hatchet and buck knife in 1983 to murder and mutilate a Chino Hills couple and two children.

Last year, he won a ruling that allowed DNA testing of cigarette butts found in the family’s stolen car, and on blood found in the couple’s home and on a T-shirt near the house.

But the DNA tests convicted Cooper again, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounced the evidence against Cooper overwhelming.

He may be right. But am I absolutely, 100% certain Cooper is the murderer?

Not at all. And nine of 11 members of a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel had doubts too.

The court ordered new DNA testing on the T-shirt at the request of Cooper’s attorneys. If a chemical used to preserve evidence shows up, they argued, it means Cooper’s blood was planted by police.

Cooper’s supporters also point to blond hair found in the hand of one of the victims (Cooper has black hair), along with several other possible discrepancies. One involves shoeprints found at the crime scene and the possibility that prosecutors withheld information about the kind of shoe Cooper was wearing.

“No person should be executed if there is doubt about his or her guilt, and an easily available test will determine guilt or innocence,” the 9th Circuit majority ruled.

But how can you eliminate every last scintilla of doubt?

The answer is that you can’t.

The judicial process works pretty effectively overall, but it can’t possibly be right all the time on either the civil or criminal sides of the law.

Does it make sense that Martha Stewart is on trial and Kenneth Lay isn’t?

Does it make sense that O.J. is on a golf course somewhere, lining up a putt?

It’d be nice to think the simple matter of right and wrong determines who gets arrested or convicted, but it’d also be nice to believe Santa has a team of flying reindeer.

You’ve got to throw several other factors into the mix, including politics, race, the unreliability of witness testimony, police credibility, defense lawyer competency, prosecutorial ambition, the vagaries of jury dynamics and, of course, money.

To pull just one example from current events, how about the homeless man who spent eight months in jail awaiting trial after three Orange County preteen girls said he attacked them? The brats made up the tale so mom wouldn’t be mad they got home late.

(And how about the Garden Grove cops who dragged the 12-year-old girls out of school in handcuffs Monday as though they were terrorists? Any child in that school could have come up with a dozen smarter ways to handle the situation than those amateur crime-busters.)

By the way, I’m not trying to tell you the country’s prisons are packed to the rafters with innocent people. The vast majority of inmates no doubt earned their bars. But when you’re talking about putting someone to death for a crime, it isn’t enough to be right 99% of the time.

Last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a record-tying 10 death row inmates in the United States were exonerated. In December, Nicholas James Yarris became the 10th when he was released from a Pennsylvania prison after serving 21 years on death row for a murder and rape he did not commit, according to DNA tests.

Yarris was the 112th inmate saved from wrongful execution since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1973. So how many more of the 3,504 men and women on death row today might also be mistakes? And how many of the approximately 630 in California alone?

You can be a serial killer and not get sentenced to death, but you can kill once and get executed. Adding to the lack of any continuity or logic, 12 states have no death penalty at all.

The good news is that because of DNA testing, and a public that has become all too familiar with stories of inmates getting sprung from death row after years of maintaining their innocence, we may make fewer mistakes in the near future.

The number of executions has been decreasing each year, says Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center. That’s partly because of DNA advances, and partly because we’ve finally found it in our hearts to stop executing the mentally retarded.

But even death sentences, says Dieter, are on the decline, dropping roughly 50% since the mid-1990s. He thinks prosecutors are responding to a “growing hesitancy” on the part of jurors to make a mistake that can’t be corrected on appeal.

A mistake that is irrevocable.

Final.Wanting an eye for an eye is an understandable impulse for those left to grieve homicide victims, and that’s been the story in the case of Kevin Cooper.

But even when there are no doubts about killers, I’ve always wondered which is the more satisfying punishment:

A life behind bars, or an escape to the next world?

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.

Santa Paula will be breezy today, with mostly sunny skies and temperatures in the high 60s.