Cory Session remembers the day in May 2008 when the DNA results came back, the first step in clearing his brother Tim Cole’s name.
“It doesn’t seem like 10 years have gone by, but the calendar doesn’t lie,” Session said. “It’s a scab that gets pulled back when you talk about it.”
Cole was a veteran and a student at Texas Tech in the mid-1980s when he was arrested. A rape victim picked him out of a lineup, then he was tried and convicted. In 1999, he died behind bars after an asthma attack.
“They were blind, and chose to be blind,” Session said. “But they refused to say, ‘Hold on, stop, we made a terrible mistake.'”
Then, District Attorney Matt Powell and the investigators found some validity to a letter sent by another man, claiming to have committed the rape.
“We had received a letter from a young man saying he had committed a crime, and believe it or not, we get letters like that quite a bit,” Powell said.
Session and Powell agreed, what the D.A.’s office did next was something not many attorney’s offices at the time would have done.
“There was nobody that could ever force us to do new DNA testing,” Powell said, “but it was the right thing to do.”
When the results came back and implicated a man named Jerry Wayne Johnson, Powell said it was the only case he’s ever seen where the testing brings back different results.
“My job, it’s to see justice – not to get convictions, but seek justice,” Powell said. “Justice in that case was proven that Timothy Cole didn’t commit that offense.”
Instead of responding with bitterness and hate, Cole’s family spent the next decade fighting for change at the Texas Capitol. Session said more than $68 million have been paid out to help the wrongfully convicted under the Tim Cole Act.
“Our great loss was a great gain for the state of Texas and the wrongfully convicted,” Session said.
Texas Tech University Chancellor Robert Duncan was a senator at the time, and he took up the crusade with the family.
“This case was the symbol of an issue that’s not just in Texas, but a nationwide issue,” Duncan said. “We’ve deprived them of their liberty and so giving them the opportunity to have a future is important.”
He and other legislators made strides in the use of DNA technology to create a process for post-conviction examination.
Cory said, while he missed his brother every day, he finds hope in the strides the state has made for so many victims in the last 10 years.
“So, we work to make sure than people don’t forget this can happen if we are not careful and exact,” Session said, adding their goal will always be “Justice For All,” just like the Tim Cole statue promised.
