A PLEA FOR JUSTICE: The Timothy Cole Story

During the closing months of 1984 and extending through March 25, 1985, a number of violent rapes occurred around Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas. As a result, females, both students and employees of the university, along with those who worked in the general area, were caught up in a wave of terror in the persona of the Tech rapist.

A PLEA FOR JUSTICE: The Timothy Cole Story recounts how a 24-year-old black student, an army veteran also attending Tech, became entangled in a web of deceit that branded him as the assailant.

After conducting a brief investigation that yielded no physical evidence whatsoever to link Tim Cole with a recent rape, overly-aggressive police detectives concluded nonetheless that he committed the aggravated sexual assault on a fellow student whom he had never actually seen until the first day of his trial.

Before he passed away while serving the thirteenth of a twenty-five year sentence, Tim Cole expressed a fervent desire to be vindicated, exonerated, and pardoned, and in an effort to honor his last wishes, a devoted mother and family, supported and represented by the Innocence Project of Texas, carried the fight through the court system, both houses of the Lone Star State’s legislature, to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and finally to the governor.

This is a gut-wrenching story of courage, devotion, conviction, honor, a family that never compromised its principles—and at the end of a struggle that lasted almost twenty-five years, the manner in which the Lone Star State conducts criminal investigations and treats its exonerees is rocked to the very core.

Read more: FOREWORD by Jeff Blackburn, founder and chief counsel, the Innocence Project of Texas

Source(www.timothybriancole.com)