Texas law firm finds nearly $100M spent on wrongful convictions

LUBBOCK, Texas – A new study done by the Michael & Associates Law Firm in Austin found that since 2009, the state of Texas has spent nearly $100 million in lump sum payments to wrongly convicted exonerees.

The Tim Cole Act, which was signed by then-Gov. Rick Perry, provides compensation to Texans that were wrongly convicted of a crime. Since it became law, 93 exonerees or their families, have been compensated.

The legislation is named after Tim Cole, a U.S. Army veteran and Texas Tech student, who was falsely accused and wrongly convicted a sexually assaulting a female student in 1985. Cole was sentenced to 25 years in prison, but died in 1999 due to complications from asthma while he was incarcerated.

More than 20 years after his conviction, Cole was cleared of all wrongdoing after a jailhouse confession from Jerry Wayne Johnson and new DNA testing. Cole was given the first posthumous pardon in Texas history by Gov. Perry in 2010.

“We will never stop saying Tim Cole’s name because need to remember what we did to him,” said Allison Clayton, director of the Texas Tech School of Law’s Innocence Clinic.

According to data from the Texas Public Comptroller’s Office, the state has paid $99,839,320.13 in lump-sum payments. Under The Tim Cole Act, exonerees are required to be paid $80,000 per year of wrongful incarceration, along with a monthly annuity that costs the state nearly $6 million per year.

The state is also required to pay an additional $25,000 per year for every year an exoneree was required to register as a sex offender or if they were placed on parole after being released from prison.

“100 million dollars is nothing to shake a stick at,” said Ben Michael, a criminal defense attorney whose law firm conducted the study. “How much money have we wasted to fix a problem that never should have been there in the first place.”

Data from the Texas Public Comptroller’s Office indicate that a majority of wrongfully convicted exonerees have received at least $1 million in lump sum payments, and that on average, many of them were wrongfully incarcerated for at least 12 and a half years.

The study also finds that nearly 40% of the 93 exonerees were wrongfully convicted in the Dallas County. At least three exonerees, including Cole, were convicted in Lubbock County.

On the issue of race, the study finds that more than 61% of those wrongfully convicted were Black, even though Blacks only make up nearly 12% of the entire Texas population.

“That math doesn’t add up,” said Michael. “It never has. It never will. Our justice system is inherently flawed.”

According to Rebecca Stumph, director of research for Michael & Associates, records from the Texas Public Comptroller’s Office show that the Cole family received a lump-sum payment of $1,060,000.

“For every Tim Cole that the public knows, there’s hundreds more that they don’t and it’s our job to keep fighting for them so they too can have their own form of justice, however insufficient that may be,” said Clayton.

To read the full report, visit: https://zealousadvocate.com/resources/studies/wrongful-conviction-payments/

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