I've just been reading a number of news stories on an amazing DNA "innocence" case down in Texas. And with this one, you kind of have to read a number of them because no one report seems to have all the maddening details in full. Here's one and here's one and here's one and now I'll try to summarize the whole ugly tale for you…
In the mid-eighties, a sicko who some called "The Tech Rapist" was terrorizing young women at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. It was assumed he'd been caught and his career ended when a young man named Timothy Cole was convicted of the 1985 rape of a 20-year-old woman. The woman identified him from a police lineup but Cole maintained his innocence, pointing out (among other things) that the victim described her assailant as a heavy smoker. Cole had terrible asthma and didn't/couldn't smoke.
In court, Cole's lawyer tried to suggest that another man, a fellow named Jerry Johnson, was the actual guilty party. The victim's i.d. was too compelling, however, and Cole was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was offered one of those plea bargain deals where he could get probation if he confessed but he refused, insisting he was not going to say he'd raped someone when he hadn't.
In 1995, Johnson began confessing to the rape. In fact, he repeatedly told authorities he'd done it but no one paid any attention to him even though he had a history of similar crimes. Indeed, DNA testing would later prove that he, not Cole, was the rapist…proof that came too late to help Timothy Cole. In 1999, Cole died in prison from heart problems related to his asthma. Last Friday, a judge said, "I find to a 100 percent moral, factual and reasonable certainty that Timothy Cole did not sexually assault [the student]" and he ordered Cole's name cleared. It's a nice gesture but a little tardy, don't you think?
How many things went wrong in this case and how often do they go wrong, individually or collectively, in others? The victim identifying the wrong man is the least of it. There's no way to prevent that from happening but then we have the situation where Cole was basically told, "If you admit you did it, you'll get out of prison and if you insist you didn't, you'll stay there for a long time." That's a horrible choice for him and a horrible choice for society. But I guess it does make the prosecutors' lives easier when someone confesses. So the accused have to be given some incentive to do that whether they're guilty or not.
A lie would have gotten him out but standing by the truth put and kept Timothy Cole in prison. Then along comes a convicted sex offender…one who had also been a suspect in the case so it's not like he was some stranger who was nowhere near the scene of the crime. He says, "Cole didn't do it…I did" and the authorities ignore him. Could that have had anything to do with the fact that it's embarrassing to admit you put an innocent man in prison? That it's easier to pretend that other confession couldn't be legit and to hope it will just go away? One might even suspect that when you have a serial rapist around, there's great pressure on law enforcement to make an arrest…so maybe they were a wee bit hasty to pin it all on Cole and once they had, they couldn't go back.
My friend Roger and I sometimes debate the Death Penalty, which I'm largely against because I think our judicial system is too inefficient to be trusted with that power. Roger's attitude is that even if the wrong guy is occasionally convicted and executed, that's no great injustice because the kind of person who winds up wrongly on Death Row is the kind of person who's probably guilty of something else heinous, anyway. Still, of this case, I don't think even he'd say, "Well, how do we know Timothy Cole didn't rape someone else?" He'll more likely say, "No system is ever going to be perfect. This kind of thing is going to happen once in a while." I suspect "once in a while" occurs a lot more often than any of us might like to think.