Tim Cole: Died in Prison, Cleared a Decade Later

A Texas Tech student and Army veteran was picked from a lineup built around his photo. He died behind bars. The man who did it had been confessing for years.

What Happened

On March 24, 1985, a 20-year-old Texas Tech student was abducted from a church parking lot near her dormitory, driven to a vacant field, and raped. She described her attacker as a young Black man who smoked cigarettes throughout the attack.

Two weeks later, a plainclothes detective outside a pizza restaurant near campus decided that Tim Cole, a 26-year-old Army veteran studying business at Texas Tech, resembled the composite sketch. Cole did not smoke. He had severe asthma.

How the Case Was Built

A detective took a Polaroid photograph of Cole. His brother later said officers told the family the photos were to help find a robber. That Polaroid went into a six-photo lineup alongside five standard jail mugshots. Cole’s was the only color snapshot, and he was the only man facing the camera; the other men faced sideways. The victim picked him immediately. She picked him again the next day from a live lineup. Other witnesses, including the victim of a similar earlier attack near campus, did not identify him.

The rest of the State’s evidence added little. A serologist testified that the attacker and Cole shared a common blood type, without establishing whether Cole had the secretor status the evidence required. A hair analyst said foreign hairs were “similar” to Cole’s without reaching any firm conclusion. Cole’s family testified that he was home studying that night, and the defense showed he did not smoke. Most evidence of the other campus attacks was kept from the jury.

In September 1986, after six hours of deliberation, a Lubbock jury convicted Tim Cole. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

What Went Wrong

• A lineup built around one face. When one photo looks different from the others, the witness’s eye goes to it. Cole’s was the only photo of its kind in the array.
• Forensic testimony that sounded like proof. A shared blood type that much of the population carries and a hair comparison with no firm conclusion were presented to a jury that had no way to weigh them.
• A confession nobody acted on. In 1995, Jerry Wayne Johnson, already serving a long sentence for other rapes, wrote to judges, the prosecutor and Cole’s lawyer to say he had committed this one. By then the statute of limitations had run, and no one followed up. Johnson wrote again in 2000. Cole was already dead.

How It Came Apart

Tim Cole died in a Texas prison in 1999 from complications of his asthma, about 13 years into his sentence. His family says prison officials had made him work outside in the cotton fields. He never learned that another man was confessing to the crime.

In 2007, Johnson’s letter reached the Innocence Project of Texas and Cole’s family. Lubbock prosecutors cooperated with DNA testing, and in 2008 the results excluded Cole and matched Johnson. Lubbock courts declined to hear the family’s request for a court proceeding, so attorney Jeff Blackburn filed in Austin. In February 2009, after a two-day hearing in which Johnson testified that he was the attacker, Travis County District Judge Charlie Baird ruled: “I find that Timothy Cole shall be and is hereby exonerated.”

The victim spoke at that hearing too. She apologized to Cole’s family for her mistaken identification and told Johnson he had robbed Cole of his life. She went on to become one of the family’s strongest advocates.

On March 1, 2010, Governor Rick Perry granted Tim Cole a full pardon for innocence, the first posthumous pardon in Texas history. His mother attended the announcement, and the family later carried the pardon certificate to his grave.

Where Things Stand Now

Cole’s family received about $1.06 million in state compensation. His younger brother, Cory Session, has spent years working on wrongful conviction reform in Texas. But the most lasting part of this case is how often his name now appears in Texas law.

How Texas Law Answers It

The Tim Cole Act

Passed in 2009, the Tim Cole Act rewrote Texas’s wrongful imprisonment compensation law. It raised compensation to $80,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, added an annuity and post-release services, and for the first time compensated the families of people who were exonerated after their deaths. Texas’s system does not depend on whether DNA was involved, which is why exonerees like Richard Miles qualified. That is not true everywhere: in Case No. 04, Sandra Hemme receives nothing from Missouri because her case did not turn on DNA.

Eyewitness identification

The same year, the Legislature created the Timothy Cole Advisory Panel on Wrongful Convictions to study why innocent Texans were being convicted. Mistaken eyewitness identification was at the top of its list. In 2011 the Legislature added Article 38.20 to the Code of Criminal Procedure, requiring every Texas law enforcement agency to adopt a written photo and live lineup policy based on eyewitness memory research. Those policies govern how fillers are chosen so that no one photo stands out, what witnesses are told, how their confidence is recorded, and whether the officer running the lineup knows who the suspect is.

Studying what goes wrong

A second body, the Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission, reviewed Texas exonerations and issued its final report in December 2016. Its recommendations reached beyond eyewitness evidence to forensic practice, including a call for crime labs to confirm suspected drugs in every prosecution, a problem we covered in our post on presumptive drug tests.

DNA and the clock

Cole was cleared because evidence from 1985 still existed and could be tested. Today a convicted person can ask for testing under Chapter 64 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, discussed in Case No. 01. Cole’s case also shows why preservation matters: without the stored evidence, Johnson’s letters would have remained just letters.

What This Means If You Are Charged in Texas

• Treat every identification as evidence to be tested. Get the array, the instructions, the confidence statement and the policy, and compare what was done to what the policy required.
• Look at how the suspect was found. A resemblance noticed on the street is a starting point for an investigation, not a conclusion. Ask what else was done.
• Make forensic “matches” say what they actually mean. A shared blood type or a “similar” hair includes large parts of the population. Make the State quantify it.
• Pursue alternative suspects and similar crimes. Other attacks with the same pattern, and the people charged with them, can matter as much as anything in the State’s file.
• Insist that the evidence be preserved. Biological evidence that is kept can prove innocence decades later. Put the State on notice early.

The Bottom Line

Tim Cole was convicted because of a photograph that stood out from the others, and he died before anyone listened to the man who kept confessing. Texas could not give him back his life. What it did instead was put his name on the law that pays every wrongfully convicted Texan, and on the panel that pushed the State to fix how lineups are run. Those laws only help if they are used, and in an identification case that starts on the first day.

Sources

This post is an informational synthesis for educational purposes and is not legal advice. It is based on the court record, the National Registry of Exonerations and published reporting available as of October 2026. The victim is described by role rather than name. Jerry Wayne Johnson confessed under oath and was matched by DNA, but the statute of limitations had expired and he was never prosecuted for this crime. Case citations and statutory references should be independently verified before use in any filing.