House Passes Wrongful Conviction Bill
On April 24, the Texas House passed the Tim Cole Act (House Bill 1736) by Rep. Rafael Anchía, which increases the lump-sum compensation paid to wrongfully convicted persons to $80,000 for each year spent in prison. The bill also sets compensation at $25,000 for each year a wrongfully convicted person spent on probation or registered as a sex offender.
The measure is named for Timothy Cole, who spent 13 years in prison for a 1985 rape he did not commit. Cole died in prison in 1999, but it wasn’t until this year that he was officially exonerated, after a two-day hearing in Travis County.
Under current law, Cole’s family is not eligible to collect the more than $1 million in compensation that Cole would be owed. Anchía’s bill would change that to make the heirs or family of a deceased inmate eligible for the lump-sum compensation. It also requires the state to provide exonerees with free tuition at a trade school, community college, or state university, up to 120 credits. By accepting the state compensation, an exoneree gives up the right to file a civil rights lawsuit against the state.
Anchía told his colleagues that the measure tries to “achieve a semblance of justice” for folks whose lives have been halted by a wrongful conviction. A handful of Texas’ 38 exonerees were on hand in the House gallery for the passage of the measure. “Don’t think of these men as the other; think of them as ‘us,'” Anchía said. “Because, frankly, what happened to these men could happen to any of us. It could happen to the representatives in this body; it could happen to our children.” The bill passed with just one dissenting vote (Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas).
This article appears in May 1 • 2009.