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A Plea For Justice: The Timothy Cole Story

Category:  Biography
Publisher: Eakin Press
ISBN-10:  1935632043
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 258
Copyright: 2010
ISBN-13: 9781935632047

A Plea For Justice: The Timothy Cole Story is the gut-wrenching account of a twenty-four-year-old black Texas Tech student, majoring in Political Science, and an army veteran dubbed as the “Tech rapist”—who was unjustly arrested, convicted, and incarcerated until his death in 1999 while serving the thirteenth year of a twenty-five year sentence, all for a 1985 rape crime in Lubbock that he did not commit. Ten years after Cole died, Judge Charlie Baird of the 299th District Court sitting at Austin took the bold and unprecedented step and exonerated him, and the day before Texas Election Day of March 2, 2010, Governor Rick Perry granted him a full pardon which is the first ever posthumous pardon in the state’s history.

McKinley worked closely with the Lubbock Police Department, the Innocence Project of Texas in Lubbock, as well as Tim Cole’s mother and family. The well-illustrated book contains a provocative and fascinating story that could have well been plucked from a crime novel that illustrates how in a bid for a quick arrest and verdict, the police department and the county district attorney ignored the basics of crime investigation and prosecution. But in the end, the work provides a message of hope for those innocents who yet remain behind bars—and its theme underscores how a mother, bound by love, honor, and conviction, never gave up on a promise to prove her son’s innocence