When a Wake County jury decided late last month to spare the life of a man that prosecutors described as a “monster” and “cold-blooded serial killer,” death penalty opponents quietly hugged one another.
Samuel J. Cooper, 33, whom defense attorneys had portrayed as mentally scarred from years of physical and emotional abuse, would not join the 157 inmates on North Carolina’s death row. The killer, convicted by the same jury of five first-degree murders, would spend the rest of his life in prison without possibility of parole.
The sentence was a sign of changing times in North Carolina, one of 35 states where capital punishment is allowed – but used less and less frequently.
