Posted on 02/25/2004 7:22:25 PM PST by calcowgirl
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California's attorney general asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to review a lower court's order staying the execution of convicted murderer Kevin Cooper.
An 11-judge en banc panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Cooper's execution earlier this month. Just hours before the scheduled Feb. 9 execution, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn the ruling, thus allowing Cooper to live.
In his first death-penalty case, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had earlier denied Cooper clemency.
In the Wednesday legal filing, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer appealed to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to intervene in the case.
The petition argued that the 9th Circuit acted incorrectly under federal rules to give a second, en banc hearing to the Cooper case after a three-judge panel denied the murderer's request for a stay of execution.
Cooper was convicted for the grisly murders of two adults and two children in Chino Hills, California, in June 1983 shortly after he escaped from a nearby prison, where he was serving a burglary sentence. The four were hacked to death with a hatchet, ice pick and knife.
Cooper has maintained he is innocent, attracting the support of activists who oppose the death penalty, including Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the former boxer wrongly imprisoned for nearly 20 years on a murder charge.
In a separate case on Tuesday, Supreme Court overturned the death sentence for a Texas man because prosecutors had suppressed significant evidence favorable to him at his trial.
You mean, the most overturned, obscenely liberal court in the country 9th Circuit Court?
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