 In 2008, "The Avalanche-Journal" led an investigation into the 1985 rape conviction of Tim Cole, a Texas Tech University student who had died in prison in 1999 at the age of thirty-nine.The A-J’s three-part series on Cole’s exoneration in light of DNA evidence, “Hope Deferred,” helped prompt a legislative ruling in Texas permitting posthumous pardons, and on March 1, 2010, Governor Rick Perry granted the state's first posthumous pardon to Cole.