State lawmakers need to act this session to prevent one of the Lone Star State’s most unsavory penchants from spreading to places like Colorado.

In a macabre set of events Monday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry with great fanfare announced what a happy day it was for Texas because he was posthumously pardoning a man who had died in prison after being wrongfully accused of a savage rape back in 1985.

The set of circumstances leading to the pardon are the stuff of nightmares.

Army veteran Tim Cole was wrongly convicted of raping a Texas Tech University student and sent to prison, where he died in 1999 because of asthma complications. But he was cleared by DNA evidence in 2008, years after another suspect confessed to the crime.

It’s taken two years to actually clear his name after his death because Texas law previously didn’t allow for posthumous pardons.

This, however, is a state that may have future use for such a process.

Texas leads the nation in death sentences per capita, and the number of those wrongfully convicted across the country has continued to climb.

Right here in Colorado, Fort Collins murder suspect Tim Masters was released from prison after spending about eight years there for a murder he did not commit. After a subsequent investigation, DNA evidence showed that it was someone else that murdered Peggy Hetrrick in 1987, someone who has never been caught.

Masters certainly isn’t alone. Since 1989, there have been more than 200 convictions overturned across the country because DNA evidence cleared them, according to the Innocence Project. Of those cleared, 15 were on death row. Experts estimate that only a small fraction of those wrongfully accused can or will be proven innocent by DNA evidence.

Colorado and all other states must demand greater integrity and accuracy from the criminal justice system. To think that innocent people have been wrongfully imprisoned is horrendous. To think that suspects have been mistakenly put to death or die in prisons unable to prove their freedom is repulsive.

Amnesty International points to more than 100 prisoners released from death row in the United States since 1973 after evidence emerged proving their innocence. The bulk of those cases have come to light recently because of innovations in DNA processing that were unavailable not long ago.

Monday was not a happy day. It was a testament to the need to repeal the death sentence in this country, and for the criminal justice system to incorporate checks and balances to ensure there isn’t more “good news” coming from posthumous pardons in Texas or anywhere else.

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