Paper publishes propitious profile of Texas exonerees

Timothy Cole

The Houston Chronicle has produced a remarkable interactive feature on Texas exonerees titled "A Human Tragedy," with photos and interviews of 24 Texas exonerees - some famous, others relatively obscure, but all having endured extraordinary and heart-wrenching personal journeys. Go here to access interviews with each of them, and here's the feature article accompanying the multimedia project, highlighting the cases of Michael Morton, Tim Cole, Joyce Ann Brown and James Giles. Great work by reporter Tony Freemantle, photographer Billy Smith II, who explained the motivation behind the project in a brief Q&A: "I just felt that the first sound bite when they first get out of court wasn’t enough. We’re trying to figure out how they’re doing, where’s their life going. All of them are different. You have some that want to change the system so that this doesn’t happen to anyone else. But then there are some that move out into the country and, you know, live by themselves and don’t get along with other human beings. I mean they’ve been caged up like an animal and never had any privacy and now they want all the privacy they can get." Fascinating stuff. Kudos to Chronicle editors for putting the project together.