Friends, When Curtis Hill signed off on the deal releasing Keith Cooper from prison in April 2006, two steps on his exoneration had already occurred: First, the case against Cooper’s co-defendant Christopher Parish had already been overturned by the Indiana Court of Appeals in December 2005. Second, the Elkhart County Prosecutor’s Office had received the results from the DNA test of the hat left at the scene of the robbery, the hat with a prominent letter J in rhinestones on its front, that pointed to Johlanis Ervin, who began a 24-60 year sentence in a Michigan prison in 2002 for a murder in that state. At the risk of stating the obvious, you will notice that there is no J in either “Keith Cooper” or “Christopher Parish.” When the Elkhart County Prosecutor’s Office offered Cooper to be released from prison on time served if he would agree to drop the appeal of his conviction, the office had sufficient information to know that the case against Cooper would be hard to maintain if he had then continued his appeal. That evidence only grew in later years, with the victims of the robbery testifying before the Indiana Parole Board that they had misidentified Cooper as the robber, with the prison snitch recanting his testimony, and with the original prosecutor repudiating Cooper’s prosecution earlier this year. When Caleb Walden, the administrator of the Facebook page Pardon Keith Cooper, met Curtis Hill in August, Hill cast doubt on this exonerating evidence. This is part of Walden’s report of that encounter: “I started out by asking him if he had heard of Keith Cooper, and Governor Pence's inaction regarding his pardon. Mr. Hill's reaction caught me off guard. Not only had he heard of the case, he took the position that there is still some doubt as to the fact of 100 percent innocence. I'm still curious why he started off so defensive... It could simply be that he assumed I wasn't there to support the Trump/Pence campaign so he wanted to challenge me and take the side of the prosecutor. Or maybe there's still some false information out there. It was just a strange reaction. So, I questioned him on what was still in doubt. He rattled through his memory of the case stating that there were some ‘problems with the evidence’ and ‘DNA on a hat’ as reasons why the Pardon hasn't been swift.” (You may read Walden’s whole report here: https://www.facebook.com/PardonKeithCooper/posts/591575414344242:0.) And now we wait on Curtis Hill’s office for a response to Keith Cooper’s petition for a new trial. During the recent vice presidential debate and in other recent public comments, Governor Mike Pence has denied that there are any such things as implicit racial biases or institutional racism involved in policing and the criminal justice system. Part of his argument is that instances of black police officers shooting black people contradict an assertion of racial bias in the shootings. An answer to this is that one looks not only to what an individual officer does, but also to the biases of the police force, court, or correctional institutions the person works for. Curtis Hill is an African American man. But don’t look to his race but to the actions of his prosecutor’s office to see what biases he maintains. There is plenty of evidence for biases at work in the case created against Keith Cooper in 1997 (before Hill became Elkhart County’s lead prosecutor). As Thor Miller, chair of the Indiana Parole Board, said in 2014, Keith Cooper was arrested, tried, and convicted simply because the police needed to arrest a tall black man, and he fits that very general description. The racial biases of Hill’s office may be maintained by the unjust deal offered to Cooper in 2006. But they may be further supported by what happened to Cooper’s co-defendant Christopher Parish and by the case of the Elkhart 4. Once Parish was exonerated, he sought compensation from Elkhart County for the eight years he spent in prison, and he was initially awarded $78,125. That’s about $9800 per year he spent in prison for a crime he did not commit. He appealed to the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and in 2012 that court raised his award to $4.9 million. That averages to $612,500 per year of his imprisonment, though the national median award of compensation to exonerated persons has been $790,000. That the Elkhart County Prosecutor’s Office has opposed justice every step of the way for both Parish and Cooper tells us something about their priorities. (By the way, to this day, Keith Cooper has never met his co-defendant Christopher Parish. Their prosecution in 1997 never established that they knew each other.) A far more infamous case in Elkhart County began in October 2012 when four youths and one adult decided to get into some mischief. They decided to burglarize a house, and went in search of one with no one home. These five individuals did not carry weapons. Unfortunately, the owner of the house they decided to burglarize was home, and he shot and killed the adult as they all fled the scene. Curtis Hill decided to try all of the teenagers as adults for felony murder for the death of their adult friend. One was sentenced to 45 years, two to 50 years, and one to 55 years. The legal theory is that the adult participant in the burglary would not have died if they had not been committing a burglary, so the felony murder charge is for a death resulting from the commission of another felony. Never mind that none of the youths were armed and they were all fleeing when the shooting occurred. All of these murder convictions have been overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court, though of course they are still convicted of the burglary they actually committed. These youths have had their cases feature on the Dr. Phil Show and on ABC Nightline. It should come as no surprise that of the four, one is black and one is Hispanic. (For more information about the Elkhart 4, see here: https://freetheelkhart4.com/who-are-the-elkhart-4/.) For an Attorney General candidate, Curtis Hill has had some seriously problematic cases under his supervision. Several times now, his office has not ended up on the side of true justice. The aspersions he cast on Cooper’s case in August parallel Donald Trump’s continuing insistence that the Central Park Five are guilty of a gang rape from which they have been exonerated by DNA evidence. Rather than admit that the justice system has continually failed Keith Cooper, Governor Pence insists that he still bring his case back to court to face the opposition of Curtis Hill’s Elkhart County Prosecutor’s Office. Please continue to pressure Pence to pardon Cooper, Indiana GOP gubernatorial candidate Eric Holcomb to pledge to pardon Cooper if he is elected, and Indiana GOP Attorney General candidate Curtis Hill to (a) support a pardon for Cooper, and (b) not oppose a retrial for Cooper. Contact information for all of these are given in previous updates. And if you are an Indiana voter, please do not vote for Curtis Hill. Even if you like a law-and-order stance, his record is not always on the side of justice, as even the rulings of Indiana’s higher courts show. Thank you for your support of a pardon for Keith Cooper. Jack Heller