Just how weak is the government's case against Carl Derek Cooper, the 30-year-old black man accused in the July 6, 1997, triple slaying at the Starbucks in Georgetown? It is so weak that one of the nation's capital's two house organs, The Washington Times, the one that pretends to oppose President Bill Clinton, felt the need on August 16, in a lead editorial presenting highly selective and prejudicial evidence, virtually to scream for Cooper's execution. "Death and Carl Derek Cooper" they chose for the title knowing that if they truly were to characterize the words that followed and call it "Death to Carl Derek Cooper" they would come off sounding like an uncivilized lynch mob. The tricksters at the Times, when the occasion calls for it, can mince words with the best of them.

Consider how the editorial begins:

In short, it appears they have tried to hang about every unsolved crime in a three-state area on young Mr. Cooper and The Times is eager to have us believe that he is guilty of every one of them. After reminding us of the violence of Rayful Edmond and company, they follow with:

Let's stop right here and have a more sober look. If this be a gang, where are the gang members? Not a single other person has, as yet, been named. Originally, they were telling us that the botched robbery was Cooper's distinguishing M.O., the big thing that the cop shooting and the Starbucks killing, as they have fashioned it, had in common. Now there's just the sort of man you want leading your gang. And the way Cooper let himself be maneuvered into implicating himself in the Starbucks caper doesn't remind one in the least of the shrewd and worldly Edmond, a man who managed to continue running his large drug operation for some time after he had been sent up the river.

I know it's impertinent to ask, but where is the evidence for this Cooper crime spree? We have been told nothing of any of it except some very unconvincing stuff on the Starbucks murders and the cop shooting. Is it possible that they are withholding that from us because it is even weaker than what we have been told they have on him in those two crimes. Is it possible for evidence to be weaker? The evidence against him in the 4 a.m. shooting of the off-duty policeman in a car with his girlfriend in Hyattsville, Md., in 1996, from what we have been able to gather, is that a pistol was found at the scene with fingerprints on it. Were they Cooper's? No. They belonged to someone else, whom the police were able to trace, and that man, who has not been named or charged with anything, implicated Cooper. Then this guy, who must approach Edmond in IQ, really tossed the cops a juicy bone (if the police can be believed on this; a big if) by telling them that the hapless Cooper had mentioned participating in the Starbucks killings. Yes, it's in the Washington Times of March 5, 1999.

Just think about this for a minute. Of all the numerous crimes with which Cooper has been charged, we have been told of only one solid piece of tangible evidence, a gun with fingerprints on it, and those fingerprints don't belong to Cooper. Rather, the owner of those prints was somehow able to "implicate" Cooper and take the heat off himself, for a one-man robbery, at that. Maybe he's even smarter than Edmond.

Back to the editorial:

See what we mean about the selective presentation of evidence. Let's look at how the "confession" unfolded. We first heard of Carl Derek Cooper in a March 2, 1999, front-page article in The Times entitled "Suspect questioned in Starbucks killings." Cooper had been picked up on a warrant for the shooting of the policeman and the familiar "sources close to the investigation" were telling us that the police believe, for no reasons yet given, that he was one of the Starbucks killers, although he had not yet been charged with that.

Really? They just got through telling us that the man actually did rob both the woman and the officer, and the Starbucks shooting has never looked liked anything so much as a merciless contract killing from day one to anyone willing to think for himself. The constant repetition of the mantra, "botched robbery" does not make it so. In fact, from the beginning nothing has been more suggestive of high-level skulduggery than the immediate and then continuous description of the crime as an apparent botched robbery in the face of highly-suggestive evidence to the contrary. Also heightening suspicion is the extremely sparing and incidental mention of the fact that the apparent primary target of the shooter or shooters wrath, night manager Mary Caitrin (Caity) Mahoney, had been one of the original interns in the Clinton White House and that she was a Democratic Party activist. Since Monica Lewinsky's name became a household word, there has never been any mention at all in the mainstream press, to this writer's knowledge, of the two former interns names in the same breath, although the February 9, 1998, online Washington Weekly gives George Stephanopoulos as the source for their information that Monica used to hang out at the Starbucks where Caity worked.

The article continues:

The FBI? Wouldn t you know that they would find an excuse to get in on the act, although neither the police shooting nor the Starbucks killings violates a federal law. But the FBI is, indeed, very much into frame-ups. You can ask former Black Panther activist Geronimo Pratt in California or security guard Richard Jewell in Georgia about that. (For information on Pratt check out http://www.ldfla.org/goldin.html, or if you really want to become an expert on the case go to http://www.ldfla.org/ji_menu.html and survey the whole web site. Jewell, for his part, had the great good fortune of having a personal friend who was an honest and courageous lawyer who came to his rescue. But for that unlikely happenstance, he could well have been on his way to death row, although the recorded voice warning of the impending Olympic bombing for which he was charged was clearly not his.)

As consistently wrong as the anonymous sources have been, one must wonder why The Times keeps treating them like the Fount of Truth.

Then the case apparently broke wide open on March 4, 1999. The Times greeted us with big front-page headlines on the 5th, "Second Starbucks Suspect Held." With the sub-headline, "Arrested man was friend of slain worker in coffee shop." Further driving the nail in the coffin of the newly-arrested man is a large color photograph of some police standing by cars in front of a collection of red brick buildings with this caption, "In custody: Police presence is heavy at the Mount Rainier apartment complex where police arrested Keith Maurice "Boo" Covington."

The tone of the accompanying article is almost gleeful. Covington, a man with a criminal record including drugs, like Cooper, brings all of the pieces of the puzzle together.

One extra bit of salient information is dropped: "Conflicting reports indicated Mr. Cooper named a third man in the Starbucks killings, who may be in prison out of the region on an unrelated conviction."

For its part, The Washington Post is less cautious about the implicated third man. Their front-page headline, below the fold, reads "Detained Man Names 2 Others in Starbucks Case." But they are far less celebratory in their tone than The Times. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey is quoted, saying only that they "feel very good about the recent break" but that does not mean that they yet have enough evidence to file charges against the new suspects. More reason for caution is given in an accompanying article on the A26 continuation page. Its title reads ominously, "Lawyers Assail Lengthy Interrogation."

From this article we learn that police were still questioning Cooper 54 hours after he had been brought in for questioning, and he had still not been brought before any judicial officer of the county. "Under Maryland court rules," we are told, "police are required to present a defendant to a court commissioner without unnecessary delay and in no event later than 24 hours after arrest."

No doubt they did, and no doubt he was. And look who was right in the thick of the questioning: "Cooper was arrested as a fugitive from Prince George s County about 6:30 p.m. Monday near his home in Northeast Washington, and then was questioned overnight at the FBI field office. He appeared in D.C. Superior Court about noon Tuesday, waived an extradition hearing and was taken immediately to Prince George s.

The next day Cooper s willingness to "cooperate" bears fruit, but not for him. "Cooper charged with Starbucks slayings" says the big headline at the top of the front page of the March 6, 1999, Washington Times. "Police clear, free second suspect, now say lone killer used 2 guns" says the sub-headline.

Cooper, it appears, thought he could play the same snitch game that the guy did who implicated him in the cop shooting, but something went wrong (for information on how the snitch game has replaced the establishment of guilt through the accumulation of evidence see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/. Covington, a black, must have had an alibi, because his presumed guilt was really a big help to the police, what with his acquaintance with the victim, Emory Evans, the only black among the three victims.

Notice the subtle change. The employees weren t "closing for the night" they were closed for the night, as attested to by the witness who had been cited many times in the case, most recently by this same newspaper and one of the same reporters, Jim Keary, just four days before. Just the day before, in fact, the wording was "the shop had been closed." The reporter seems already to know the tack that will be taken to explain how Cooper got into the store, but memories are still a bit too fresh for it to be broached just yet.

Reading a couple of other Washington Times articles between the lines, articles written by others besides Keary, their main Metro crime reporter and principal reporter covering the case and therefore the one most dependent upon the police for his stories, is revealing. We get further indications of the great effort made to stick the Starbucks crime on Cooper in spite of the paucity of genuine evidence against him. The first, also on March 6, by Kristan Trugman, is entitled "PG, D.C., FBI united in probe of Cooper" with the subtitle "County held off to solve Starbucks case."

It begins this way:

The careful reader of all that has as yet been made public in the news may interpret that statement to say: When police finally arrested Carl Derek Cooper, they had no more evidence against him for the crime for which he was arrested, the shooting of a policeman, than they did some nine months before. That evidence consisted only of the word of one very questionable person. The evidence they had against him for the Starbucks shooting at the time of his arrest was even less, which is why he was not originally charged with that.

The article continues:

The next day, Sunday, March 7, 1999, the Metro section of The Times leads with "Starbucks suspect to face D.C. charges before PG case" by Ronald J. Hansen. The article begins with three short paragraphs essentially repeating what is in the headline and then we have this: "His prior criminal record--robbery, car theft and heroin use--as well as the violent nature of the Starbucks charges will ensure he remains behind bars as the case unfolds in court.

So here we are back to a man who has left fingerprints at one crime and has been apprehended for another, but is as yet unnamed and presumably uncharged with anything. His finger-pointing at Cooper for Starbucks would appear, at this point, to have rewarded him handsomely. If you didn t do it before, perhaps now is a good time for you to click on http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/  to see how things like this happen all the time under our "snitch" regime of jurisprudence.

On Thursday, March 18, 1999, it looks like the jig is finally up for Cooper. On that day, at the bottom of page 1 of The Washington Times, Jim Keary has an article entitled "Suspect admits to casing Starbucks before crime" in which Cooper appears to fess up to the whole Starbucks massacre. The article begins, "Carl Derek Cooper admitted to police investigators that he planned to rob a Georgetown Starbucks a month before he walked into the coffee shop and gunned down three employees during a botched robbery."

Well, there you have it don t you? Let's read on:

So, what we have going on here is what a D.C. policeman says Cooper said when he was being interrogated by Prince George's police.

It must have been an ironclad alibi, and Boo Covington can be very, very thankful that he was able to remember where he was on the evening of July 6, 1997, and that it was confirmable beyond a shadow of a doubt. But for that stroke of luck, in all likelihood it would be his execution, even more than Cooper's, that The Washington Times would be crying for editorially. Anyone reading their March 5 headline and accompanying articles could certainly detect the wind blowing very strongly in that direction at that time.