No Country for Innocent Men | Mother Jones

There is no formal legal means in Texas to confess to a crime for which someone else has been convicted. "I guess you can contact whatever law enforcement agency handled the case," says Lubbock District Attorney Matt Powell. That, of course, is precisely what Johnson did when he copied his petition to the district attorney in 1995. "Here you've got a guilty guy saying, 'I did this crime,'" says Jeff Blackburn, chief counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas. "All the ears went deaf and all the eyes went blind."