Exoneration of a murder/capital murder conviction is a rare and phenomenal event in the criminal justice system. In general, exoneration means the person convicted is officially cleared based on new evidence of actual innocence.

Only 16 people sentenced to death in Texas have been exonerated since 1973, according to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

For obvious reasons, exoneration is very important for Cook, who spent 20 years on death row for the murder of Linda Jo Edwards — a crime he says, and now Texas Court of Criminal Appeals says, he did not commit.

Cook, now 68 years old, has had to live with the stigma of being a convicted murderer for most of his life. During the past 46 years, he also endured two retrials, another conviction, and a plea agreement before his conviction was initially set aside in 2016.

Being exonerated now gives Cook a chance to seek compensation from the state for wrongful imprisonment.

Exonerations are rare because an appellate court’s duty is to decide procedural issues, not to determine guilt or innocence. In Cook’s case, the court was forced to take the extraordinary step. By doing so, it overturned numerous rulings by a variety of trial judges and previous appellate judges.

By its own opinion, the court rejected a 2016 decision in which Judge Jack Carter opined that Cook had not met the burden of proof to support his actual innocence claim.