Friends, The following is the note I've sent to the Congressional Black Caucus. Please see the contact information I posted in the previous update. I hope that you will contact the Caucus and, if one of the members is your representative, that person as well. Thank you for your help. Dear Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, I am the creator of an online Change.org petition in support of a pardon for Keith Cooper. Cooper is a Black man who was arrested in Elkhart, IN in 1997 for armed robbery resulting in serious injury. Since his arrest, the evidence against him has fallen apart. DNA evidence from a hat recovered at the crime scene points to another man since imprisoned in Michigan for murder. The victims of the robbery have identified that Michigan inmate as the actual robber and have recanted their testimony against Cooper. The jailhouse informant against Cooper has recanted his testimony. In 2005, the Indiana Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of Cooper’s alleged co-defendant Christopher Parish, and in 2014 he was awarded $4.9 million for his wrongful incarceration. In 2014, the Indiana Parole Board issued a unanimous recommendation for a full pardon of Cooper on the basis of his actual innocence of the crime. Earlier this year, the original prosecutor of the case against Cooper, Michael Christofeno, wrote a letter to the governor also recommending a pardon. Yet, to this very day, Keith Cooper remains a convicted felon. After the case against Christopher Parish was overturned in December 2005 and after the DNA evidence pointing to the Michigan inmate was received in March 2006, the then-current prosecutor in Elkhart County, IN, offered Keith Cooper a deal to be released from prison with time served. Having heard that his family was then living in a homeless shelter, Cooper accepted the offer. However, doing so required him to drop his appeal of his conviction and to keep the conviction on his record. This has resulted in a number of consequences to Cooper’s life—including difficulty getting a job promotion or finding a new job and always having to identify himself as a felon. This also affects his family, such as preventing his wife from working in childcare, for example. The prosecutor who signed off on the 2006 deal was Curtis Hill, who has just been elected to be Indiana’s next Attorney General. The governor who has refused to pardon Keith Cooper is Mike Pence, now the Vice-President elect helping to form Donald Trump’s cabinet. Rather than pardoning Cooper, Governor Pence has required Cooper to pursue a retrial in the Elkhart County Criminal Court. However, doing so puts his case again in the office of the same prosecutor, Curtis Hill, who is fighting against a retrial on the basis of the 2006 deal. This Catch-22 comes as a result of Governor Pence’s professed bias in favor of the judicial process, even when its end result can be shown to be flawed from the beginning in Keith Cooper’s case. January 2017 will be the twentieth anniversary of Keith Cooper’s arrest for armed robbery, and it will also see the inauguration of Governor Pence as Vice President of the United States. Keith Cooper and our petition effort on his behalf can use your help. We are 112,000 people who want to see real justice, exoneration through a full pardon, come to Keith Cooper. May we call upon you, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, to raise the issue of Pence’s refusal to pardon Keith Cooper as Pence is involved in staffing the cabinet? Could you consider offering a congressional resolution calling upon Pence finally to pardon Keith Cooper? Our hope is that we can count on you. Sincerely, Jack Heller, creator of https://www.change.org/p/indiana-governor-pardon-an-innocent-man