After serving 10 years of a 40 year prison sentence for an Indiana armed robbery and attempted murder, Keith Cooper was freed when eyewitnesses recanted their testimony against him, new DNA evidence showed he wasn’t at the scene of the crime, and a jailhouse informant admitted that he lied to investigators.



Five years later, Cooper filed a pardon petition that, if it were granted, would make him the first person in the state's history granted clemency based on a finding of innocence. When his request was presented to the parole board, they found unanimously that he should be pardoned and have the two serious felony charges wiped from his record.

Now, after waiting for more than two years for Governor Mike Pence to act on the board’s decision, Cooper has learned that the GOP vice presidential candidate won't — unless Cooper can prove to the governor’s administration that all other judicial remedies have been exhausted.

“To our knowledge, Mr. Cooper has not filed a petition with the courts in Elkhart County to determine whether post-conviction relief is available,” Gov. Pence’s general counsel Mark Ahearn wrote in a letter to Cooper this month.

Though Cooper is now out of prison, his felony conviction remains on his record, limiting his job opportunities.

“I’m tired of people judging me by that conviction. That [Department of Correction] number. That’s not who I am,” Cooper told BuzzFeed News in August. “Man, I know that better than my own Social Security number.”

Cooper’s legal team disagrees with the Pence administration’s assertion that Cooper needs to first ask the courts to vacate his sentence and grant him his innocence.



After the new evidence was revealed — which included testing on a hat left at the scene by the suspected assailant that did not include Cooper’s DNA — the judge offered Cooper a deal to be re-sentenced and be released with time served. By accepting this deal, Cooper withdrew a post-conviction relief petition attempting to have his conviction vacated. Cooper and his attorneys claim that when this petition was withdrawn, it prevented him from moving forward with his request to have his conviction thrown out by the court.

An Indiana Public Defender submitted a letter in Cooper's petition to the governor for a pardon saying that by accepting a lesser sentence and withdrawing his post-conviction petition, Cooper was out of options with the courts to grant his innocence.

However, the Pence administration does not see this as proof that Cooper’s only option to have his conviction thrown out is the governor’s pardon.

“While Mr. Cooper’s counsel commissioned a public defender to submit a memo as to why post-conviction relief is not available to Mr. Cooper that is not dispositive, nor is it an official finding of any court,” Ahearn wrote in his letter to Cooper.

Ahearn wrote that this decision not to act on Cooper’s pardon request was “out of respect for the judicial process.”