One day, in May of 1985, Kevin Cooper first set foot on death row at San Quentin State Prison, in the San Francisco Bay. Three weeks ago — 39 years later — he left one of the oldest, most famous and most feared prisons in the United States. He was heading to his new home: California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF).
While it has the name of a hospital, it’s actually a penitentiary. His death sentence still weighs on him, but the change, he admits, “has been like going from hell to some sort of heaven.” Cooper is no longer required to be handcuffed and escorted whenever he’s outside the cell in which he’s serving time for a crime he maintains he didn’t commit.
He has double the square footage that he had in San Quentin, as well as a window through which he can see the sky. Even his blood pressure has gone down. But the best thing, he tells EL PAÍS — in a phone call that, every so often, is interrupted by an automated voice that warns that the conversation is being recorded — is that, in the new prison, he has access to ice.
Cooper is one of 636 people on death row in California, 20 of whom are women. Of the 27 states with capital punishment , California has the largest population in the country. And not so much because California is the most populated state: rather, it’s because judges continue to sentence people to death, but they’re not killed.
The last execution took place in 2006. In fact, after the U.S.
Supreme Court reintroduced capital pun.