Twenty-five years after he was wrongly named the Texas Tech rapist and just more than 10 years after he died in prison, on March 1, Gov. Rick Perry finally signed a posthumous pardon clearing Timothy Cole of any responsibility for the 1985 rape of Michelle Mallin.
“I have been looking forward to the day I could tell Tim Cole’s mother that her son’s name has been cleared for a crime he did not commit,” Perry said in a press statement. “The State of Texas cannot give back the time he spent in prison away from his loved ones, but today I was finally able to tell her we have cleared his name, and hope this brings a measure of peace to his family.”
Cole was posthumously exonerated in 2009 (the first such exoneration in Texas) after a hearing in the Travis Co. court of Judge Charlie Baird, during which Mallin testified on behalf of Cole, saying in part that detailed information about her attacker that she’d given police was apparently ignored.
Nonetheless, it took Perry more than a year after his in-court exoneration to pardon Cole. Perry said he wasn’t clear that Texas law would allow him to pardon someone who was already dead. The pardon comes after the state’s attorney general’s office (when asked in writing by Houston Dem Sen. Rodney Ellis) said the law would allow such a move.
“While this is a great step forward…there is still so mcuh work to be done to prevent cases like Tim’s from ever happening,” said Jeff Blackburn, chief counsel and founder of the Innocence Project of Texas, which has been representing Cole’s family. “There is no telling how many more people just like Tim Cole are sitting in prison right now.”
This article appears in February 26 • 2010.