Posthumous Pardon: The tragedy of wrongful conviction.

A wrongly convicted man, who died while on death row in Texas in 1999, was given a posthumous pardon on Tuesday.

The tragedy of wrongful convictions is highlighted once more in the Lone Star State.

Governor Rick Perry gave Texas’ first posthumous pardon to former death row prisoner Tim Cole. Having languished in a cell for thirteen years Cole died of an asthma attack in 1999. He was sentenced to death in 1986 for the rape student Michelle Malin but had always proclaimed himself to be innocent.

Mr Cole’s case offers a window into the shockingly lax and unjust nature of the Texas criminal justice system. A man had confessed to the crime of which Cole was convicted in a letter to the authorities four years before Mr Cole had died. No one followed it up. Years afterwards the same man wrote to Cole’s family. They pursued the claim and demanded DNA testing.

Over ten years after he died these DNA tests confirmed what Mr Cole had always asserted: his innocence. Governor Perry only granted the pardon more than a year after Cole’s innocence had been proved and once the State Attorney General’s office had decided that it was within the law to grant a posthumous pardon.

Despite this Perry made the rather tenacious claim that he has “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” and that he hopes “this brings a measure of peace to [Cole’s] family.”

British grandmother Linda Carty, another prisoner who has always declared her innocence, currently sits alone in a Texas prison waiting to hear whether the US Supreme Court will accept her appeal for a re-trial. Should they refuse her life is in Governor Perry’s hands. More than 300 people are on death row in Texas facing a similar situation.

The case of Tim Cole highlights the dangers of devastating miscarriages of justice in the capital punishment system. Who knows how many more of those on death row have been wrongfully convicted? As Jeff Blackburn of the Innocence Project of Texas said, “There is no telling how many more people just like Tim Cole are sitting in prison right now.”