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Two more tragic injustices have been uncovered in Houston in the span of a week, just as a panel created by the Texas legislature prepares recommendations on how to prevent wrongful convictions.

On March 1 Texas Governor Rick Perry officially pardoned Timothy Cole, who was wrongfully convicted over two decades ago. Tragically, the DNA tests that proved Cole’s innocence came too late: he died in prison in 1999 while serving time for a rape he did not commit. A faulty lineup led to inaccurate eyewitness evidence in Cole’s case, which serves as a reminder of the urgent need for eyewitness identification reforms that increase reliability and reduce the risk of mistakes. Cole’s case was one of the thirty-nine Texas wrongful convictions exposed by DNA profiled in The Justice Project’s report Convicting the Innocent: Texas Justice Derailed.

Texas has seen more than its share of controversy surrounding forensic science in recent months.

Most recently, the Houston Chronicle reported that an audit of the Houston Crime Lab’s fingerprint division identified problems in more than half of the 548 cases selected for review. The problems discovered were serious enough to lead the authorities to require that more than 4000 violent crime cases from the past six years be reanalyzed—a process that no doubt will be very costly for the city of Houston.

Texas has made many headlines in recent years for the spate of exonerations of wrongfully convicted men. Claude Simmons Jr. and Christopher Scott were released from custody in Dallas on October 23 based on new evidence of innocence, including the corroborated confession of one of the true perpetrators.