City set to unveil statue of man wrongly convicted of rape who died in prison

Story here. Excerpt:

'Even while imprisoned for a rape he didn't commit, Tim Cole never stopped acting like a big brother.

"He would send us letters, telling us what classes to take, telling us to look out for a subscription to Money magazine he was sending us," brother Cory Session remembers.

Cole was a student at Texas Tech when he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for the 1985 rape of 20-year-old Michele Mallin.

In 2009, DNA would exonerate Cole, but not until a decade after he died in prison, at age 39, from heart complications related to his asthma.

To those who loved him, Texas can never right the false conviction, but the Lubbock City Council wants to make sure Cole and his case are not forgotten. The city unveiled a statue of the Fort Worth native across the street from the Texas Tech campus on Wednesday afternoon and dedicated the area where the bronze likeness will stand as the Tim Cole Memorial Park.
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"Tim had the integrity to say, 'I won't confess to something I didn't do,'" former Lubbock City Councilman Todd Klein said. "He refused to take his freedom on the cheap."

That legacy is just one of the reasons Cole will be memorialized at one of Lubbock's busiest intersections.

Klein was instrumental in seeing that the sculpture was erected. He felt it was important, he said, to "remind us of this teachable moment" in the city's history.'