Family Of Man Cleared By DNA Still Seeks Justice

[John Q. Citizen]

Source: National Public Radio - Morning Edition

Morning Edition, February 5, 2009 · The family of a man convicted of rape will be in an Austin, Texas, courtroom Thursday to try to clear his name — joined by the woman whose testimony helped imprison him.

In 1985, Timothy Cole was a student in Lubbock when he was arrested and accused of being the Texas Tech rapist. A string of coeds had been raped, and the young African-American man from Fort Worth, who'd never been in trouble with the law before, was convicted largely on the eyewitness account of one rape victim.

Nearly two decades later, a jailhouse confession by another man prompted new DNA testing in the case. Those tests proved that Cole was innocent, that he should be exonerated and released. But in this case, that proved impossible.

It was Sunday night, March 24, 1985, and Texas Tech sophomore Michele Mallin had just returned to her dorm room after a weekend visiting her relatives. It was getting late when she remembered that she needed to move her car to a legal parking spot.

Read more: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100249923

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Further on in the story we find what the cops and the DA should have seen right away:

Her attacker had one very distinguishing characteristic. "He smoked the whole time," she says she told authorities "from the get-go."

A chain-smoking, African-American rapist who used a knife. That was the man the Lubbock police should have been looking for. But it was a nonsmoking, asthmatic black man they eventually settled on.

[MineralMan]

1. Yessir...I seen him. He's that black man over there

sitting at the defense table.


I guess that's good enough for Texas justice....

[AlexDeLarge]

2. Shades of 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

Convicting a black man who could not use his left hand when the woman's attacker was clearly left-handed, seems just so coincidental to convisting an asthmatic man where the attacker was a chain-smoker. I bet the jury was all white, too.

It's the South, Jake. It's the South.

[pacalo]

7. It happens everywhere, but you're right -- generally, it happens most often in the South.

I looked it up. There were cases in Ohio, New York, & Canada just on that first page, but most were from southern states.

I'm not a big fan of the police down here, in general, but there are a lot of good ones that I've come across, too.

[BeliQueen]

3. So much blame to go around but no one willing, except the victim, to take responsibility

EVERYONE in that case--including the jury--should be held responsible for this man's death.

How did it get to trial in the first place. He had a roomful of alibi witnesses.

Tragic.

[John Q. Citizen]

5. The jury only hears what they are told, and i can't blame them if they weren't told the

victim reported the attacker was a chain smoker.

The judge wouldn't allow the defense to suggest that maybe the real perp was the one responsible since he was in jail for a crime with a similar M.O.

I read that the Dallas Co DA has started a Conviction Confidence Procedure so that the public can be reletively sure that those being convicted are the actually the perps.

[angrycarpenter]

4. My brother lives in Texas.

I told him that Texas has executed so many innocent people that their whole state should be charged with murder. His response? "They were all scumbags who did something they should die for even if they didn't do what they were executed for." In other words guilty of being black. I am sure that he could rationalize even this case as being the right course of action.

[bertman]

6. The remedy to this kind of travesty is to hold the DA and police officials legally liable

for their malfeasance and/or incompetence. Whenever a person is wrongfully convicted based on false evidence, evidence withheld, or gross incompetence, and the conviction is overturned by a retrial or by some other means such as DNA testing, the DA and/or police officials/officers responsible should be required to serve out the sentence they imposed on the innocent victim.

That would slow the rush-to-imprison train down.