Samuel Cooper murdered five men in Raleigh, North Carolina, between May 2006 and October 2007. The dead were Ossama Haj-Hussein, LeRoy Jernigan, Timothy Barnwell, Ricky High and Tariq Hussain, aged 34 to 52. The deaths came at intervals of weeks and months, each on a different date, over a period of seventeen months.
Cooper was 30 when he was arrested in November 2007 on a bank robbery charge in the neighboring town of Garner. The inquiry that followed tied him to all five deaths, and at a trial in Wake County Superior Court in March and April 2010 his lawyers did not dispute that he had committed them. The only question for the jury was whether he had acted with premeditation and deliberation. On April 6, 2010, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder on all five counts. The State asked for the death penalty. After about fifteen hours of deliberation over three days, the same jury recommended life without parole, and on April 20, 2010, Superior Court Judge Henry Hight imposed a life sentence.
Cooper had a criminal record in Wake County that went back to 1993: ten arrests on nineteen charges, among them assault, escape, robbery, drug charges and larceny. He was serving a 20-year sentence for robbery, assault and drug offenses in 1999 when he escaped from custody. He was caught within days. He was released in February 2006, after about twelve years and at least twenty recorded infractions. The Department of Correction later said the release followed the sentencing rules in force when he was convicted.
The first of the five deaths came about three months after he was freed.
Ossama Haj-Hussein, called Sam, was 43. He died on May 12, 2006, in Raleigh. Prosecutors said at trial that Cooper had killed him so that he could not identify him. The first-degree murder charge for his death was one of five tried together.
LeRoy Jernigan, 41, was of Clayton. He died on June 3, 2006, in Raleigh. Prosecutors told the jury that Cooper had killed him in the course of a robbery. In an interview played in court Cooper gave robbery as a motive and said he had mistaken who Jernigan was. Detectives testified that he later described the killing as a mistake.
Timothy David Barnwell was 34. He died on April 27, 2007, in north Raleigh.
Ricky High was 48. He died on October 12, 2007, in Raleigh. In the police interviews Cooper described the killing as a mistake.
Tariq Hussain, 52, died on October 14, 2007, two days after Ricky High, in Raleigh. He was the last of the five.
Raleigh police investigated the five deaths as separate cases. On November 21, 2007, Cooper was arrested in Garner on a bank robbery charge. Investigators then linked him to the five deaths by evidence, and the State Bureau of Investigation tied the earlier cases to the arrest.
Raleigh police and the Wake County Sheriff's Office announced the murder charges at the end of November 2007. He made his first court appearance on November 27, 2007, said little, was appointed an attorney and was denied bond. A judge told him he could face the death penalty. Prosecutors had not before charged anyone in Wake County with five homicides at once, and each was charged as a separate event on its own date.
Cooper agreed to speak to detectives and confessed to the five deaths. He also described details of the crimes that had not been made public.
The trial was first expected in September 2009 and was repeatedly postponed at the request of both sides. Assistant District Attorney Jeff Cruden said the case involved some 64,000 pages of discovery. In November 2009 the defense asked Judge Hight to suppress the confession as coerced, and Detective Amanda Salmon testified about the interview at a hearing that began on Monday, November 16. On December 17, 2009, the judge denied the motion and set the trial for February 1, 2010. It began in March.
The trial ran for more than a month before Judge Hight. The State called 52 witnesses and the defense 11, over some sixteen days of testimony; the guilt phase alone heard from more than three dozen witnesses over twelve days. It was described as the first recent case in the county in which one defendant was tried for five homicides at once. A defense lawyer's illness caused a recess of three days in the third week.
The State's evidence was Cooper's confession and the findings of a State Bureau of Investigation specialist, who testified on March 26, 2010. The defense accepted that Cooper had committed them. His lawyers argued that years of physical abuse in his childhood had left him with post-traumatic stress disorder and a dissociative disorder, and that he was in a delusional, emotionally detached state at the times of the deaths and could not weigh what he was doing.
Dr. George Corvin, a forensic psychiatrist for the defense, testified that Cooper believed he had no choice. He had met Cooper for 36 hours over 17 sessions, and said Cooper was highly defended and tended to hide or minimize his history; he also said Cooper had difficulty recalling why he had made some of his confessions. Dr. Nicole Wolfe, for the State, found that Cooper had a mental disorder but saw nothing to show that it had impaired his ability to reason when the killings took place. She had interviewed him once, for three hours, and Dr. Corvin criticized the brevity of her examination.
Prosecutors presented Cooper as a deliberate killer who knew that what he did was wrong. In four of the five cases they said robbery was the motive, and that in at least some the victims were killed so that they could not identify him. Closing arguments came on Monday, April 5, 2010. For each death the jurors could find first-degree murder, second-degree murder or not guilty; they were also asked to decide on the bank robbery.
The jury returned its verdict on Tuesday, April 6, 2010, after about five hours of deliberation. It found Cooper guilty of first-degree murder in each of the five deaths and guilty of the bank robbery. The same jury then heard the sentencing phase. The defense presented a clinical psychologist's report on the effects of the abuse Cooper had suffered as a child and rested on April 14; Cooper told the judge he would not testify. A death sentence would have made him the sixth person sent to death row in North Carolina since legal challenges put executions on hold.
The jury deliberated for about fifteen hours over three days. It recommended life without parole. One juror said afterward that jurors were unhappy with the choice before them and that trying the five cases together had made the decision especially hard.
Judge Hight imposed a life sentence on April 20, 2010. Cruden, who had also prosecuted Cooper after the 1999 escape, apologized to the victims' families. Cooper sat with his head down and said nothing.
Cooper appealed to the North Carolina Court of Appeals, represented by Mark Montgomery. At the hearing on December 15, 2011, Montgomery argued that the confession had been coerced and should have been excluded, that the jury had not been properly instructed on deliberation, and that a recording of a further interview in which Cooper asked for an attorney had been lost or destroyed. He asked that the murder convictions be set aside and that Cooper be retried without the confession. Steve Arbogast of the Attorney General's Office argued for the State that the facts supported guilt, that police had neither threatened nor deceived Cooper, and that his mental condition had not prevented him from forming the intent to kill.
On March 6, 2012, in a published opinion by Judge Cheri Beasley, the Court of Appeals rejected the arguments on the confession. It held that the trial court's findings were more than sufficient to support its conclusion that the confession was not coerced; that Cooper's continued assertions of innocence were not an unambiguous invocation of the right to remain silent; and that, because he had himself reopened the conversation after asking for counsel, detectives had not violated his right to a lawyer.
Under the version of G.S. 14-17 in force in 2005, first-degree murder was a Class A felony punishable by death or by imprisonment for life without parole, as the court determined under G.S. 15A-2000. That statute provides for a separate sentencing proceeding before the jury that returned the guilty verdict, which is why the same panel that convicted Cooper went on to hear evidence about the effects of the abuse and the families of the dead before recommending life.
The question for the jury in Cooper's case was the mental element. First-degree murder required premeditation and deliberation; second-degree murder did not, and the jurors were told they could choose it for any of the five deaths. The defense case rested on whether Cooper was capable of deliberating at all. The jury decided that he was.
Cooper's guilt of the five deaths was not contested at trial. Whether he acted with deliberation was the dispute, and the verdicts settled it. The State's motive for the individual deaths was robbery in four of the five, as prosecutors presented it; the motive in the fifth is not on record.
1993: First arrest in Wake County.
1994: Sentenced to 20 years for robbery and related offenses.
1999: Escapes from custody; recaptured within days.
February 2006: Released.
May 12, 2006: Ossama Haj-Hussein dies in Raleigh.
June 3, 2006: LeRoy Jernigan dies in Raleigh.
April 27, 2007: Timothy Barnwell dies in Raleigh.
October 12, 2007: Ricky High dies in Raleigh.
October 14, 2007: Tariq Hussain dies in Raleigh.
November 21, 2007: Cooper is arrested in Garner on a bank robbery charge.
Late November 2007: Charged with five counts of murder; first court appearance November 27.
December 17, 2009: Judge Hight denies the motion to suppress the confession.
March 2010: Trial begins in Wake County Superior Court.
April 6, 2010: Guilty on five counts of first-degree murder and the bank robbery.
April 20, 2010: Life sentence imposed after the jury recommends life without parole.
December 15, 2011: Appeal argued in the Court of Appeals.
March 6, 2012: Court of Appeals rejects the confession arguments.