The Dallas Morning News Crime Blog reports:

Like 18 of his fellow exonerees, Evans was convicted based on eyewitness testimony. The Dallas Morning News published a series last year that showed all but one of the DNA exonerations used faulty eyewitness testimony to convict.

Evans was wrongly convicted of raping an 18-year-old Southern Methodist University student when she and a friend were headed out to go dancing in Deep Ellum.

He was convicted in 1987.

Evans matched the description of the rapist, including having a speech impediment, court records show.

If Evans is released tomorrow, he will become the 20th person cleared by DNA testing in Dallas County.

The Innocence Project of Texas is proud to have participated in Tim Cole’s exoneration and the intense investigation leading up to his name being cleared by Judge Baird in Travis County.  For more information about Tim’s case, visit our “Texas Cases” page and then click on “Texas Exonerations.”

More than two decades [after his conviction] Richard received new scrutiny in a review of some 160 cases with questionable HPD blood-typing, or serology, evidence. Lawyers discovered that in Richard’s case HPD analysts had obtained two sets of conflicting results, but reported only conclusions favorable to the prosecution.

They also discovered that the physical evidence collected after the attack, and assembled into a “rape kit,” had been destroyed sometime in the years after Richard’s conviction, eliminating the option of DNA testing to resolve the discrepancy. Lawyers instead ordered less-discriminating serology tests, which analysts at a California lab completed Friday. Those tests suggest Richard is not a match for fluids in the rape kit. Semen from the crime scene displayed no evidence of the attacker’s blood type, meaning he was what is known as a “non-secretor.” The new tests confirm that Richard displays his blood type in his body fluids, or is a secretor who would have been identifiable had he been the source.

[Richard's attorney, Bob] Wicoff has argued that the new tests confirm Richard’s innocence. “The semen evidence from the crime scene indicates that only a non-secretor could have been the source,” Wicoff wrote in an appeal filed Monday. “Richard could not have been the man who kidnapped, robbed and sexually assaulted the (woman).”

Our congratulations goes out to Mr. Richard and his attorney, Bob Wicoff, who is ably representing Richard on his DNA claim.  Mr. Wicoff, who serves as a Board member of the Innocence Project of Texas, was appointed by the courts in Harris County to review more than 100 convictions that were potentially tainted by serious errors in serological testing identified during the Bromwich investigation of the Houston Crime Lab.

To read the rest of the Houston Chronicle article, click here.

USA TODAY: “Texas Family Fights for a Man’s Posthumous Exoneration”

Austin Statesman: “Seeking Justice for Convict Who Died in Prison“

The Associated Press reports:

For Tim Cole’s family, a return to a courtroom this week renews hope they’ve clung to since he was convicted of rape more than two decades ago.

Cole and his relatives for years claimed he was innocent in the rape of a Texas Tech student in 1985. But until DNA from the crime scene was tested last year, no one else believed them.

That test showed another man, already imprisoned for rape, committed the crime for which Cole was sentenced to 25 years.

His family will ask an Austin judge on Thursday to overturn the conviction, but Cole won’t be with them. He died in prison in 1999 at age 38.

Cory Session, Cole’s brother, said the DNA test served its purpose.

“That’s vindication,” Session said. “We need exoneration. We are extremely hopeful that this process will actually get him cleared.”

It would be the first posthumous DNA exoneration in Texas, according to attorney Jeff Blackburn of the Innocence Project of Texas, paving the way for a pardon by the governor and, eventually, expunging Cole’s record.

To read the rest of the article, click here.  For more information about the Cole case, click here.