Many wrongfully convicted Harris County drug defendants never notified of innocence claims

The Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission continues to trundle along months after your correspondent left its ranks and is scheduled to meet Thursday, September 15th at 1:00 p.m. in the House Appropriations Committee Room, Texas Capitol Extension Room #E1.030. The Office of Court Administration posted links to the Agenda, Meeting Book, Appendix, and Media clips for this and prior meetings. The meeting will be broadcast live on the House of Representatives website here.

Among other documents, the "meeting book" this time contains a joint power-point presentation from the Harris County DA and Public Defender on the rash of drug exonerations in that county stemming from a combination of over-aggressive drug enforcement and faulty field tests. Their update included a reminder that quite a few falsely convicted people in this episode served out their full sentences without ever being notified they were entitled to relief. Just to try out something new, here are a few screenshot-highlights from that presentation collected into a brief slideshow:


The difficulties faced in notifying defendants eligible for relief, much less equipping them with counsel if they have a viable claim, are neither new nor unique to this episode. Rather, it's a problem the state confronts in multiple situations where large-scale forensic and/or other errors potentially taint large classes of cases instead of one or two convictions. These are not problems with obviously great solutions, but identifying them and talking about ways to improve on past failings is a good place to start.

NIJ on 'Sentinel Event Reviews'

Grits' new contributing writer Jennifer Laurin recently informed readers about "sentinel event" research, which aims to discover the source of system errors, in the context of Texas' Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission. So I was pleased to learn from The Crime Report that earlier this month, "the [National Institute of Justice] Sentinel Event Initiative Team released Paving the Way: Lessons Learned in Sentinel Event Reviews, a report on the lessons learned by three pioneering 'beta sites.'" The document focuses not on the policy lessons learned in those jurisdictions but the structures and processes they engaged in to analyze them. See an earlier NIJ report on sentinel review.

Several prominent people have praised Prof. Laurin's earlier post to me, incidentally; it's gotten a lot of folks thinking, so I wanted to at least put the NIJ links in front of readers. The next meeting of Texas exoneration commission is on December 10.

See prior, related Grits posts:

• Exoneration Review Commission To-Do List 2: Consider the Sentinel Event Literature
• Systems Failure
• Exoneration Review Commission To-Do List 1: Broaden the Conversation

Natapoff on innocence and the misdemeanor plea mill

Alexandra Natapoff this week presented a particularly sagacious version of innocence advocacy in the Washington Post (Nov. 11), titled, "The cost of ‘quality of life’ policing: Thousands of young black men coerced to plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit." The piece confronts, in virtuoso fashion, some of the same topics which the Innocence Project of Texas recently recommended the new Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission take on: Particularly the pressure on innocent defendants to plea guilty to small-time offenses because of pretrial detention. Wrote Natapoff:

Once charged, the misdemeanor process then exerts enormous pressure on individuals to plead guilty, especially if they are stuck in jail because they cannot make bail. As a result, many of them end up convicted of crimes they never committed, such as loitering, trespassing, disorderly conduct, or resisting arrest. It can happen to anyone, but because we overpolice young black men in low-income neighborhoods for precisely these types of minor crimes, it’s more likely to happen to them.

That's exactly right. Grits has declared before that I consider Sasha Natapoff a personal intellectual hero, and I don't use the h-word lightly. She's one of those rare thinkers who, whenever she considers a question deeply, the world becomes a better place as a result. Her work on informants revealed a rich vein of deep moral thinking and critical analysis which I predict the criminal-justice reform movement will mine for ideas for the next three decades. Then, her work on misdemeanors once again took a portion of the system that's treated as a relatively obscure backwater and charted a navigable route toward addressing false convictions, arguably, at a deeper and more profound level than one could ever reach exclusively through post-conviction means. As she sees it:

Such wrongful convictions represent the convergence of two of our criminal system’s worst flaws: its racial skew and its rush to convict.  Think of it as Black Lives Matter meets the innocence movement.  Our criminal system is widely criticized for targeting and overpunishing African Americans and communities of color.  But that longstanding criticism has generally focused less on whether minority defendants are actually guilty, and more on the disproportionate targeting and racism built into the system. Conversely, the innocence movement has shaken the criminal justice world by uncovering hundreds of wrongful convictions in very serious cases like rape or murder. But it has not zeroed in on the much larger pool of innocent defendants coerced into pleading guilty to minor crimes every year.

Why do these wrongful convictions remain invisible?  One reason may be the common belief that a petty conviction is no big deal. But minor convictions have major consequences. A misdemeanor conviction can deprive a person of a driver’s license, public housing, student loans, or legal immigration status. Even an arrest record can interfere with job prospects, and most employers say they check criminal records before hiring. True, the typical formal punishment for a misdemeanor is probation or a fine, not incarceration. But many offenders end up in jail anyway for failure to pay fines they cannot afford. In short, the misdemeanor process is probably burdening thousands of innocent African-Americans not only with the stigma and indignity of a wrongful conviction, but a crushing array of collateral consequences.

The structural problem lies with the misdemeanor system itself, the front-line mechanism through which we disproportionately sweep African-Americans up into the criminal system and label them, often inaccurately, as criminals. If we made the effort to expose these wrongful minor convictions, we might also accomplish something even more fundamental: disrupting the mythological link between blackness and criminality. That insidious myth, which dates back to slavery and still infects many aspects of American culture and governance, won’t be eliminated overnight.  But we — and our presidential candidates — can take a step in the right direction by recognizing that many of the young black men we convict of minor crimes and then treat as criminals for the rest of their lives are actually innocent.

Because of overcriminalization, some of the low-level offenses Natapoff discusses are actually felonies in Texas, like possessing less than a gram of a controlled substance, but her points are still well taken.

There are many brands of false convictions besides the case of the rape victim who mistakenly identifies an innocent man as her assailant, even though that's the storyline in a huge number of DNA exonerations to date. More common and insidious, though, may be false convictions for lesser offenses based not so much on honest error as coercion and expedience. Those false convictions the innocence movement has barely considered, much less begun to address.

Exoneration Review Commission To-Do List Part 2: Consider the Sentinel Event Literature

In my second post boldly offering my views for a path forward to members of the newly activated Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission, I'll expand on the brief suggestion made in my first post, that the TCERC take a "systems approach" to its work.

It's worth starting off with a brief caveat about my motivations here.  I'm not a member or an adviser to the TCERC, and so I've no particular standing to weigh in, nor reason to think that my idiosyncratic views will have traction in the entity's deliberations.  Part of the impetus to comment on the work that the TCERC is beginning, however, is that its efforts connect to a broader national trend toward establishing criminal justice review commissions, as well as a broader conversation among practitioners and academics about the optimal design of those commissions.  (The New Yorker recently featured an illuminating account of the trend and related conversation.)   So the TCERC is poised to do work of relevance to those national actors, some of whom I hope will take notice of and follow the TCERC's work . . . even if the TCERC itself takes little interest in my armchair commentary on its mission.

In those national debates, the concept of the Sentinel Event has been a critical organizing principle for (re)envisioning ex-post review of criminal justice error.  The term has been used in other high-risk industries - aeronautics and medical care, for example - to describe a negative outcome that signals weaknesses in systems or processes, and that if properly understood can be utilized to diagnose and prevent future failures.  The imperative of moving from the negative outcome to systemic understanding of its causes is the key priority animating Sentinel Event Review ("SER") in these industries.  That is to say, the manner in which an organization responds to error should be tailored to maximize understanding of how that error emerged from the structural, organizational contexts in which it arose.  For proponents of Sentinel Event Review, that premise generates some key principles:

• Review processes must involve all stakeholders;
• Review processes should be forward-looking;
• Review processes should not blaming devices;
• Review processes should instantiate a shared culture of accountability and disclosure, and should enjoy confidentiality to facilitate that goal.

In recent years, enterprising folks have begun to consider whether the concept of SER could successfully migrate to the criminal justice system - arguably another high-risk industry where error is almost always a product of complex organizational and systemic processes. (Note, the applicability is far broader than wrongful conviction review.  Police-involved shootings, the commission of a crime following a discretionary release decision, or a near-miss such as a Brady error discovered mid-trial, are all potential "sentinel events.")  The allure, in the eyes of proponents, is in SER's ability to move past the limitations of an adversary frame to error identification and correction - limitations created by legal doctrine, and political entrenchment and mistrust, among other factors.

The National Institute of Justice has devoted multiple years of study, and, recently, a healthy chunk of grant money, to the question.  And a number of real, live criminal justice organizations have operationalized the approach.  For example, the New York Justice Task Force, New York's own criminal justice review commission, recently adopted a resolution urging that organizational-level and inter-organizational level Sentinel Event Review processes be adopted.  In a somewhat different context, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (led by District Attorney and Sentinel Event Review proponent John Chisolm) has adopted Sentinel Event Review principles in its Homicide Review Commission.

There are criticisms, to be sure.  For some, the principle of removing blame from the review process will be a bug rather than a feature of the approach.  Sentinel Event Review is not, at bottom, an "accountability" process - except insofar as accountability is posited as mutually shared.  For others, the notion that a process could be truly collaborative, that the adversarialism of the justice system and its political underpinnings could be siphoned from review, is fantastical.  And some might be concerned that confidentiality of review processes is too high a price to pay for the speculative benefit of fostering stakeholder disclosure and collaboration.

Interestingly, however, the statutory design of the TCERC suggests that at least some principles of SER are embedded, as it were, in its DNA.  (This might not be accidental.  The sponsor of the legislation, Senator Rodney Ellis, is a long-time member of the National Innocence Project's Board of Directors, and representatives from the IP have been hip to and connected with Sentinel Event work for some time now.)  House Bill 48, which created the TCERC, is future-oriented (review is aimed at generating recommendations, per Sec. 8(a)), and requires membership from an array of criminal justice stakeholders and contemplates wide consultation from non-member segments of the criminal justice community (See Sec. 8(b)).  Indeed, the statute permits the TCERC to obtain information from any state entity, an authorization of appropriate breadth in systems-based review since it is not far-fetched to imagine that, inter alia, Family and Protective Services, mental health agencies, and other non-criminal-justice social services entities would bring relevant information to the table in a conversation about how a wrongful conviction occurred.  Most critically from the standpoint of SER design, the working papers of the TCERC are confidential (Sec. 8(d)), a major exemption from Texas's relatively broad open records provisions, and an important one if the premises of maximum disclosure and minimum blame are built into the Commission's mission.

So I would suggest that Sentinel Event Review is possible in Texas.  It might even have been intended by the legislature.  But perhaps the more overarching point is that an entity that has been established to generate an empirically informed understanding of best (or better) criminal justice practices should conduct its own work in a manner that is informed by an emerging understanding of best (or better) criminal justice review practices.  In recent years, Sentinel Event Review has emerged as a leading candidate for that status.  At a minimum, it should be on the radar screen of TCERC members, and the TCERC should be on the radar screen of SER aficionados.

Systems failure

This suggestion for a "Systems Approach to Error Reduction in Criminal Justice" to which Grits' new co-blogger Jennifer Laurin linked in her inaugural post reminds me of how the NYPD seeks to prevent terrorist attacks, using failures (thankfully, mainly in table top exercises) as a roadmap for crafting preventive measures. Terrorist attacks on US soil, happily, are even more rare than false convictions, by far. But taking a systems approach toward preventing unlikely but terrible outcomes makes loads of sense and is supported by the cases Texas' Exoneration Commission will review.

When dozens of drug defendants are exonerated for the same reason - they pled guilty rather than wait for months in jail for tests to come back from the crime lab - that's a systems problem, not just a problem in one individual's case.

IMO we should consider a false conviction to be as serious as a plane crash and confronting failures with a systems review, as they famously do with downed aircraft, conveys the gravity of the problem. Yes, the plane crash affects more people, at least on the surface. But for every false conviction identified and for which successful redress has been obtained, there are dozens if not hundreds of other innocent people convicted who can never be identified because there's no exculpatory DNA, Brady violation found, or other smoking gun to definitively prove their innocence.

Jennifer described that larger category thusly to me in a private email: "the real concern is that 90% of cases really aren't 'about' the evidence per se. (As the guilty pleas in the complete absence of corroborative evidence demonstrate.) They're about resources, leverage, negotiation, and enough evidence to get over the probable cause hurdle. And so that's where, as you say, bail reform meets innocence work, sentencing reform meets innocence work, etc."

That's exactly right, and it sums up the challenge faced by those who would extend innocence-related critiques and reforms beyond what Laurin called the "canonical," traditional issue areas like eyewitness ID and access to DNA testing.

Whether Texas' Exoneration Commission adopts such an approach remains to be seen, but it's arguably the best way to get to the root of these questions.

Exoneration Review Commission To-Do List Part 1: Broaden the Conversation

As Grits has been reporting in recent days, the newly minted Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission ("TCERC") has, at long last, commenced its work to review "cases in this state in which an innocent defendant was convicted and then, on or after January 1, 2010, was exonerated." Given that the group has just over a year to complete its work - its authorizing legislation requires that a report be produced by December 2016, at which point the Commission is dissolved - it will quickly need to settle on a plan of action, and craft a narrow focus for its work.  The Innocence Project of Texas has issued its own recommendations for how the Commission should proceed - recommendations that I plan to comment on in a second post on this topic.  But for today, I thought I might humbly weigh in with my own brief thoughts about the work on which the TCERC is embarking.

The overarching principle driving the bullet-point recommendations below is the following:  Texas should leverage the work of the TCERC to generate *new* insights in the innocence-driven criminal justice reform conversation, by attending to features of adjudicatory error that the innocence lens neglected to date.  Examples of such neglected issues include false guilty pleas, wrongful conviction in low-level (non-felony or less-serious-felony) offenses, the role of informants in wrongful conviction, and the responsibility of defense counsel for error non-detection; and the list could go on. 

The point is that the study of wrongful convictions to date - through other states' exoneration review commissions, academic work, and advocacy groups like the national Innocence Project - has generated what scholar Sam Gross dubs a "canonical list" of the "causes" of wrongful conviction. But nothing like rigorous (or even un-rigorous) empirical methodologies have generated that list, as I have argued elsewhere.  Rather, these are the features that emerge from (1) a particular category of cases, mostly serious, violent felonies for which (a) defendants are serving long sentences and thus have the incentive and ability to vigorously litigate innocence, and in many cases (b) physical evidence susceptible of DNA or other forensic testing is available, and (2) a particular menu of options that legal doctrine (as well as political constraints) supply for framing post-conviction claims of innocence.  Too abstract?  The professor will get specific.  Low-level crimes for which individuals are serving relatively short sentences receive next-to-zero accuracy-based scrutiny following conviction, because there is neither time nor incentive to do the litigation that typically generates exonerations.  Convictions obtained by guilty plea, which are the vast majority of misdemeanors and non-violent felonies, receive next-to-zero accuracy-based scrutiny because of waivers of review that attend the plea process, and because these convictions rest on negotiation strength, rather than evidentiary strength.  Investigative or adjudicatory deficiencies that do not sound easily in constitutional litigation, such as the use of unreliable informants (not illegal in and of itself), do not readily emerge as documented bases for exoneration insofar as the post-conviction litigation process is the diagnostic device.  This is not to say that what we think we know about wrongful convictions is wrong.  But it is almost certainly incomplete.   

My hope is that the TCERC will transcend the limitations of the standard wrongful conviction frame and generate insights that will expand the impact of an innocence-based reform frame to corners of the criminal justice system that to date have not been adequately probed and critiqued by that frame.  How can it do that?  Here are some broad-brush recommendations that might put the group on a path to achieving that goal.

• Avoid the lure of the "canonical list."  Enough said on this front.
• Ditch the litigation record and take a "systems approach."  The Commission should eschew reliance on the findings of error in post-conviction litigation as a starting point or focus for review.  The Commission model permits reconstruction of failed investigations and prosecutions *outside* the adversary model of litigation, and without the imperative of identifying *legally relevant* causes of error or attributing *blame* for error.  It is that approach - a "systems approach" - that has been successfully followed in health care, aviation, and other industries that routinely conduct reviews of failed cases.  Researchers are advocating adoption of "systems review" in criminal justice, and the TCERC could and should be on the vanguard in this respect.
• Play the "three year old" game ("Why???").  Perhaps this goes without saying, but rigorous interrogation of causation requires boldly continuing to ask "why" something occurred.  Our adversarial legal system cuts off the "three year old" game, both because some answers are not legally relevant (it doesn't matter, for example, "why" exculpatory evidence didn't reach a defendant, under Brady doctrine), and because some answers are not strategically helpful (it's not helpful, for example, to a Brady claim if defense counsel got a little lazy in looking under the hood of the prosecution's case).  The TCERC has none of these legal constraints.  It must also, of course, eschew any political constraints in playing the three-year-old game.  If the game leads to tried and true systems of plea negotiation, or of defense funding, or of informant tracking, or of bail assessment . . . so be it.
• Prioritize low-level cases in the review.  The TCERC should avoid any temptation to concentrate its finite resources on the most "serious" cases that have emerged since 2010.  Texas has the "good" fortune of having a data set of dozens of plea exonerations, thanks to an array of laboratory errors in DWI and drug cases.  This presents a rare opportunity to examine why defendants plead guilty to demonstrably false charges.  

Grits' note: This is the inaugural post from Jennifer Laurin, a UT law professor (currently visiting faculty at Columbia) and IMO one of the sharpest minds in the state when it comes to evaluating the causes of false convictions and related errors. She's coauthor of the newest edition of Police Misconduct Law and Litigation, and is currently serving as Reporter to the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Standards Task Force charged with updating the 1996 3rd Edition Discovery Standards. Please give her a warm welcome, I couldn't be more grateful to Jennifer for helping class up the joint.

Smithee to chair Exoneration Commission

The Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission held an organizational meeting on Thursday and will meet again before the end of the year.

In addition to the members designated by statute, Chief Justice Nathan Hecht appointed former Harris County DA Carol Vance on behalf of the Texas Judicial Council, and Governor Abbott appointed Charles Eskridge, a prominent Houston attorney who helps vet federal judicial candidates for Senators Cornyn and Cruz and helped Anthony Graves seek Charles Sebesta's disbarment. (As luck would have it, your correspondent is an advisory member of the panel on behalf of the Innocence Project of Texas.)

I particularly enjoyed meeting Mr. Vance, whose name I've heard since my youthful days as a reporter, by which time he was already a living legend among Texas prosecutors. Having been appointed Harris County DA by John Connally then winning reelection, Vance served in that capacity from 1966 to 1979. Then in 1992, Ann Richards appointed him chairman of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice where he presided over its massive expansion. For the past twenty years, though, he's been a passionate prison-ministry advocate. An eponymous prison unit 30 miles from Houston is the site of the late Charles Colson's famed Inner-Change Freedom Initiative. (Vance is 82.) His reputation may be that of a "stormtrooper," as an attorney friend declared upon learning of his appointment. But that's neither the sense I got from his remarks to the group on Thursday, nor from our brief conversation, after which I left thinking he could end up being a really valuable addition to the group.

Most of the meeting consisted of brief overview presentations and introduction of staff and members. Senator Rodney Ellis and an ailing but game Ruth Jones-McClendon offered opening remarks. The Commission saw a compelling video on Tim Cole's posthumous exoneration and heard exoneree Richard Miles recount the story of a prosecutor hiding exculpatory evidence to convict him and the state bar giving the guy a pass. Forensic Science Commission Chairman Vincent DiMaio described the challenges distinguishing between real and junk science among traditional forensics.

The only real action taken by the Commission was to select a chair, which HB 48 declared would be selected by the group's members. State Rep. John Smithee of Amarillo offered to do the job and was handed the gavel by acclamation. Grits thinks he'll be an excellent leader for the group.  He's passionate about the issues - as Tim Cole's family was leaving toward the end of the meeting, Smithee stopped them and pledged that the commissioners would try to make them proud - and he has supported all the major innocence reforms at the Texas Legislature over the last several sessions.

As a bonus, as a House committee chairman and ally of the Speaker, perhaps Chairman Smithee will be in a position to shepherd reforms through the Calendars Committee, which for several sessions has functioned as a graveyard for reform bills like recording custodial interrogations. After all, the important thing in the end is not, "what does the commission recommend?," but "what does the Legislature pass?" The 11 recommendations from five years ago covered six major issue areas, all but one of which (recording interrogations) have been addressed by legislation in the intervening years.

The group has basically a year to come up with new recommendations to prevent false convictions, so of necessity they'll have to limit the issue areas on which they focus. IPOT produced a summary document for the commission suggesting potential areas of focus based on the group's statutory duties and the array of cases from 2010-present they've been charged with analyzing - it's not a set agenda but a starting point for discussion. In particular, IPOT hopes they'll issue recommendations on new areas which the 2010 Tim Cole Advisory Panel did not address, like reining in mendacious confidential informants and the pressure put on innocent defendants in less-serious cases to plead guilty because of pretrial detention. The commission has a big job ahead of it and I look forward to working with all these folks.

MORE: From the Amarillo Globe-News.

Innocence work here, there and yon

Big day for my employers at the Innocence Project of Texas today:

Prosecutor faces interrogation over Brady
In Dallas, IPOT board chairman Gary Udashen questioned a former prosecutor accused of withholding Brady material in the 1999 murder convictions of Dennis Allen and Stanley Mozee (Mr. Allen is an IPOT client; Mr. Mozee is represented by the national Innocence Project). After prosecutors and the trial judge recommended relief, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered the trial court to put the prosecutor on the stand and ask him why he failed to turn over evidence of deals with jailhouse informants. That's what happened today.

DNA mixture notification snafu
This afternoon, IPOT's legal director Mike Ware attended a Forensic Science Commission work group discussing notification and indigent defense challenges related to defendants convicted based on erroneous DNA mixture protocols. (See prior Grits coverage.)

Exoneration Commission: What issues might it investigate?
See recommendations drafted by your correspondent on behalf of the IPOT for the Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Panel suggesting issue areas for possible study based on an examination of recent innocence cases. The commission's first meeting is Thursday afternoon in Austin.

Tack on the fact that we sent out a fundraising email this morning and it's been quite a busy day.

Policy wonk job fair at Office of Court Administration

There are a several interesting job openings right now at the Office of Court Administration, including two support staff for the upcoming Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission (see here and here), which must hold its first meeting by October 31st. Your correspondent, readers may recall, is an advisory member to that panel thanks to my new job. There's another researcher slot open crunching data on indigent defense.

In addition, higher up the food chain, there's a posting for the Executive Director's job at the Office of Capital Writs following Brad Levenson's abrupt but not unexpected departure. And there's an opening for OCA's Director of Public Affairs with past director and former Robert-Duncan staffer Megan Lavoie recently leaving that post. Finally, the OCA has posted an opening for its Chief Financial Officer after CPA Glenna Rhea Bowman retired to focus on her musical career. That's quite a few significant jobs open at once for a not-enormous agency.

Qualified readers should consider applying for said positions, or else badger whoever you think would be good for this or that spot into submitting an application. Texas needs good people in all these jobs.

Tim Cole honored most by reforming system that wrongfully convicted, killed him

An author of a book about Timothy Cole - who famously died in prison from an untreated asthma attack before he could be exonerated by DNA evidence - is seeking an honorary posthumous degree for Cole from Texas Tech, where as a student he had for years been falsely demonized as the "Tech rapist." The school has so far demurred, "citing a lack of achievement. But proponents say Cole accomplished more in death than most people ever do in life," reported the Texas Tribune.

There's little doubt Tim Cole's story has become one of the pivotal narratives helping redefine public perceptions of the justice system in Texas, so I'd never begrudge any posthumous honor, statue, historical commemoration, etc., that anyone wants to bestow on him. However, a colleague of mine from the Innocence Project of Texas expressed a concern your correspondent simultaneously would echo.

Some people associated with Cole’s case feel that the efforts on his behalf would be better spent on addressing criminal justice reform.

“I’m always worried that the more Tim Cole becomes a memorialized symbol, the less people will think about what we really need to do to fix the system in Texas,” said Jeff Blackburn, the founder of the Innocence Project of Texas and the lawyer who secured Cole’s exoneration.

While he had no objection to honoring Cole with a degree, Blackburn said, “it does make me think about how much energy people are willing to put into something that’s past and how little energy they’re willing to put into the scary stuff, which is changing the system going forward.”

That's exactly right. Honoring Cole's memory is important but it's no substitute for changing the system so that what happened to him will be less likely to happen to others.

If the state wants to further honor Timothy Cole, arguably the best way would be to approve the innocence commission bill named after him that would review the justice system with an eye toward proposing changes to the law to further reduce the likelihood of convicting innocent people. (The bill passed the House in 2013 but died in the Senate.) Or, the Lege could pass Rodney Ellis' and Terry Canales' bill requiring police to record interrogations in serious cases, the last, unfulfilled recommendation from the now-disbanded Timothy Cole Advisory Panel on Wrongful Convictions (which was a poor man's substitute for a full-blown innocence commission).

If Tech doesn't want to go the honorary degree route, maybe they could figure out how to endow a chair in Cole's name at the law school to hire someone to study and teach about wrongful convictions and how to prevent them. I'd be glad to see Cole further honored, but even happier if such tributes contributed to improving the justice system.