Talking Sports from Death Row with Kevin Cooper

May 3, 2007
By: Dave Zirin

Kevin Cooper is a sports fan. Kevin Cooper loves the Steelers. Kevin Cooper makes his home on death row at the notorious San Quentin Penitentiary in California. Cooper awaits execution for a crime many observers are convinced he did not commit. He was to be injected with poison until his heart stopped on February 10th, 2004 but received a stay after massive public pressure was brought to bear. The holes in his murder conviction were that egregious, that shocking. As one federal judge put it days before the execution, "When the stakes are so high, when the evidence against Cooper is so weak, and when the newly discovered evidence of the state's malfeasance and misfeasance is so compelling, there is no reason to hurry and every reason to find out the truth."

Here I interview Kevin Cooper about his love of sports. There are two reasons why I wanted to hear Cooper's thoughts. The first quite simply is that I oppose the death penalty. Kevin Cooper's case exemplifies everything that makes my stomach turn about capital punishment: it's racially biased. It punishes the innocent. And every last person is on death row