The Wrongful Conviction

Jennifer Thompson was a college student when a man broke into her home and sexually assaulted her. Jennifer did her best to help law enforcement capture her assailant, but years later would learn the wrong person had been held responsible. 

Show Notes: 

Healing Justice https://healingjusticeproject.org/ 

Picking Cotton https://www.pickingcottonbook.com/ 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
I remember thinking about what it would feel like to die,
and I remember wondering how much it will hurt.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Welcome to the Knife. I'm Hannah Smith. I'm patia Eton.
This week we speak with Jennifer Thompson. Jennifer is the
founder of Healing Justice Project, an organization that addresses the
harm caused by wrongful convictions.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Jennifer's life changed forever when, at twenty two years old,
she became the victim of a violent crime. But a
decade later, what happened to Jennifer would make headlines for
a reason so unexpected. It changed the course of her
life forever. Now, over thirty years later, she joins us
to reflect on what happened and how everything went so wrong.

(01:04):
Our conversation with Jennifer took place on February twenty first,
twenty twenty five. Let's get into the interview. Hi, Jennifer,
thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
We've been really excited about this interview, so let's just
jump right into it. Why don't you give the audience
a short intro into who you are?

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Well, I am a wife, I am a mother of triplets.
I'm the grandmother to five amazing grandchildren. I'm the co
author to the book Picking Cotton, our memoir of injustice
and Redemption. The founder of Healing Justice Project, which is
a national organization dedicated to helping all of those who

(01:49):
have been impacted by wrongful convictions kind of navigate the
healing space. Born and raised in North Carolina, and I
was born in nineteen sixty two, So I grew up
in really the segregated south half of our town was
you know, wealthy and white, and the other half the town,
literally across the train tracks were poor and black. Winston

(02:11):
Salem is a town where RG Rental Tobacco Company was founded,
Haines's Hosiery was founded. So it's like enormous wealth but
also enormous poverty. And that was where I was raised,
is where I was born, It's how I grew up.
I often tell people that you don't really notice things

(02:31):
that are wrong until you're removed from it. So the
waters that I was swimming in as a child were segregation.
I grew up in a white, relatively privileged home. So
many of us, particularly people that are white we grow
up and were given certain things, almost as a birthright.

(02:54):
You know that the criminal justice system works, and it's effective.
It's fair, and it's equal, and it's impartial, and it's balanced.
And that was certainly the way I was brought up.
I was brought up to believe that we had the
greatest criminal justice system in the world, that if you
ended up in an orange jumpsuit behind a defense table,

(03:14):
you were absolutely guilty of a crime. You're a criminal.
You deserve whatever punishment the system met it out to you.
And if you sat at the prosecutor's side of the table,
you were a victim. And it was clear and it
was clean. Within my family structure, I knew from a
very young age that I didn't belong. I ended up

(03:34):
at Elon College in nineteen eighty three. I felt like
I had found my footing, maybe for the first time
really ever. And I was also dating what would have
been a very respectable young man. In my family's eyes.
That was important, right, women were to marry a respectable man,

(03:55):
and he checked all the boxes. And so in nineteen
eighty three, I was in a really great place in
my life. I had everything that I had hoped I
would have. My goals were to finish college and then
to go on and get a master's and become a
physical therapist. July of nineteen eighty four, July twenty eighth

(04:16):
was a very hot day. I mean July in the South,
the humidity is unfathomable. So my boyfriend and I our
plan was to go play tennis. And I was a
tennis player. I played on the tennis team in high school.
I played a year at Elon College on tennis at
the tennis team. And his family was a member of
the Burlington Country Club. So we were to go play tennis,

(04:38):
and we did, and the rest of the day was
kind of, you know, a typical twenty two year old
college student day. He took me back home later that
afternoon to my apartment, and he was going to go
home and take a shower, and then we were going
to meet up for dinner and then go to a
summer party at one of his friend's houses. So he

(04:59):
picked me up probably around six o'clock and took me to.

Speaker 4 (05:03):
A Chinese food buffet because I had a very hot
metabolism in those days, and I ate just really unbelievable
amounts of food at any given sitting and so nobody
in the right mind would have ever taken me to
an a la carte restaurant.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
He always took me to a buffet because it was,
you know, for two ninety nine or three ninety nine,
I could eat as much as I wanted to eat,
which I did. I sat down and began to consume
just vast amounts of sodium laced products. But because I've
been dehydrated earlier in the day, it hit really hard
and I came down with a massive headache, just massive,

(05:43):
and I told him that there was just no way
I could go to this party, that I was sick
and I needed to go home. He took me back
to my apartment, probably around eight o'clock, give me some water,
brought me some aspirin, and my last memories that night
were him standing near me kind of rubbing my back,
just to make sure that I wasn't going to be

(06:03):
violently sick, and that was my last memory of him
that night. The police reports the following day would show
that he left some time between nine and nine thirty pm,
but I had gone to sleep, and so I did
not hear him leave, didn't hear anything at all. I
lived in an old complex, and none of these apartments

(06:28):
had central air. They all had those window boxes for
air conditioning. The window unit in my bedroom was at
my headboard, so when it would come on at night
like you could not hear anything. Therefore, I did not
hear him leave. But I also didn't hear leice sirens
that were all throughout my apartment complex at midnight. They
were searching for a man who had attempted to break

(06:51):
into my neighbor's apartment across the parking lot. He had
broken the kitchen door window. She fortunately happened to be
awake at the time watching television, and when she heard
the glass break, she looked into the kitchen and saw
a hand reaching trying to unlock her door, and she

(07:12):
called the police. He heard her call the police, and
she told the police officers that he had on a
white knit glove and a dark blue shirt with three
white stripes on his biceps. But he took off running
before they could get him. And so I didn't hear
anything at all until around three o'clock in the morning,
when I heard something like feet shuffling on my carpet

(07:37):
in my bedroom. Now I lived alone, so hearing movement
in your bedroom is alarming. But you know, when you're
in that space of awake but not really awake, you
think you might have heard something, but you're not positive
you heard it. Do you go back to sleep or
do you wake up and try to identify a noise

(07:58):
right which is really frightening, particular for women that are
living alone. And so when I opened my eyes, I
looked to the left side of my mattress and saw
the top of someone's head and I could see him moving.
And my first thought and my first impulse, was to
believe that this was probably my boyfriend, that he had

(08:19):
fallen asleep on my floor. He was trying not to
wake me as he was leaving to go home. I
didn't know what time it was at that point, but
when I thought about it, I realized that it could
not be my boyfriend. He didn't stay the night with me.
He never did because his mother lived about a mile
and a half two miles from where my apartment was,
and she was very, very intentional about where he was

(08:41):
at all times. So I knew that it wasn't my boyfriend.
And that's when I said, who is that? Who's there?

Speaker 3 (08:47):
We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
Very quickly. A man jumped up up on my bed.
I screamed, and he straddled my body with his legs
and put a knife to my left side of my
throat and covered my mouth with a glove and told
me to shut up or he would kill me.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
So terrifying.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
Yeah, it is terrifying. And I think it's important for
people to understand what happens with trauma and memory, because
I think human beings just instinctively think that they would
never make certain mistakes right. Human beings instinctively will say
I would never falsely confess. But if you've never been
in a position of being threatened and coerced and tortured,

(09:34):
you actually don't know what you would do. The same
applies for the ability to kind of make an eyewitness identification.
Everybody thinks that you know, well, I know what I saw,
but you don't know what you would do if you're
wondering if you're going to be murdered. It's about twenty
minutes total throughout the whole entire event.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
What was going through your mind? Was it just I
got to survive this?

Speaker 2 (09:58):
You know? There's a couple of things that went in
my mind. I mean, the initial thing obviously that was
in my mind was I'm in a lot of danger.
He's nineteen eighty four. There's no cell phones, there was
no house alarms. I didn't own a gun. He's on
top of me. I can smell alcohol. I knew he'd
probably been using drugs. There's a knife. I'm small, He's

(10:20):
probably done this before. So for me, the first thing
that went through my mind was do not physically fight,
because You're going to die. And I remember thinking about
what it would feel like to die, and I remember
wondering how much it will hurt, and is it going

(10:43):
to be a quick death or will it be a
slow death? And will it take a long time before
I die? And then you think about the people that
you love and what their experience is going to be
like to have to come and look at your body
and identify it. Those are the things initially that went
through my body. But then I hate bullies, and I've

(11:05):
never backed down from a bully, and I remember kind
of like pivoting and thinking, there's a chance I'm going
to die, but it won't be on my back. If
there is a way to survive it I'm going to
figure it out. And so that's when I began to
like really calculate and think. And so I remember thinking

(11:26):
to myself, like, Jennifer, you're smart. You've not been drinking,
You've you've not been using drugs. You know, you're a
straight A student. You've got a good memory. So for me,
staying alive was equated to pay attention to this person.
Figure out what he looks like, Listen to everything he says.

(11:47):
Try to pick up on a lisp or some type
of a speech that you know is just different. I
remember thinking, look for things he can't change later. Look
for scars to have twos or you know, missing teeth.
There's something that he couldn't change later on. And those
were the things that initially I started paying attention to.

(12:08):
It was at the point when he tried to kiss
me that I was gonna vomit and I didn't want
to throw up and choke on it because I was
on my back, so I turned my head and that
would actually end up saving my life that night when
he said, relax, I'm not gonna hurt you. And I

(12:29):
don't know why I said it, but I said, I can't.
I'm afraid of knives. I have a phobia, an actual
phobia of knives. And if you'll just get off of
me and take the knife to the front door and
walk down the steps and drop it on my car,
I'll let you come back in. And for whatever reason,
the power dynamics just shifted right there, so I was

(12:51):
able to get him off of me. I was able
to grab a blanket off the edge of my bed
wrap it around myself because I knew that the police
were going to ask me certain questions. They were going
to me how tall he was and how much did
he weigh, And so I had to figure out how
tall he was by me being close enough to him
to figure out the difference between a five foot one
person and him, And so I was able to kind

(13:11):
of figure that out. And I was able to look
at his clothing because I knew that, again, the police
were going to ask me those questions. He had on
dark blue canvas shoes that slipped on your feet. There
were no shoelaces. He had on khaki colored army fatigue pants.
He had on a dark blue shirt with three white
stripes on the biceps, and he had white gloves on

(13:32):
his hands. He was African American. He was in his
early twenties. He had short clothes, cropped hair, he had
a pencil thin mustache. Like every single thing that I
could remember that night meant I was going to live.
And over the next few minutes, he pretended to drop
the knife out of the front door. He came back
in and grabbed me and tried to pull me back

(13:53):
into the bedroom, and I told him I had to
go to the bathroom first, because my plan was for
him to go to the car and I was going
to lock the door and then call the police. But
he had already cut my phone lines earlier, and so
when that planned didn't work, I said, I have to
go to the bathroom. And I had to rethink, like
what's my next plan. I thought maybe I could crawl

(14:14):
out of the bathroom window, but it was small, and
it was a drop all the way down to the basement,
which is where the laundry room was. If I dropped,
i'd probably break my legs. And then I remembered him
saying he had come through the back door where the
kitchen was, and I needed to get to that back
door because his way in was going to be my

(14:35):
way out, and I told him I needed a drink
of water, and he told me to make him a drink,
and we were going to have a party. So I
told him I'd make him a drink. And as I
walked past him, he was bending down to my stereo,
turning it on, trying to find ninety eight points seven
Kiss FM because he thought we were going to have
a party. But again, as I walked by him, the

(14:57):
light coming off of the stereo illuminated his profile. While
and again it was just another image that I could
kind of glean as I went into the kitchen, and
so I started making noise with water running and ice
cubes hitting the sink and cabinet door shutting as I
started opening up the back door, and I just pulled

(15:18):
my blanket tight and I ran.

Speaker 3 (15:22):
On July twenty eighth, nineteen eighty four, a strange man
broke into Jennifer's home while she was asleep. He attacked
and raped her. Jennifer managed to escape, running out of
the back door of her home with a blanket wrapped
around her.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
It's about three point thirty in the morning, and it's
pitch black, but it's also raining now, and so it
was slippery. I thought I could go next door to
my neighbor and he would save me. As I was
banging on the door, not realizing he was gone, the
attacker came through my back door, coming after me, and
I knew I'd made him angry. So I did the

(16:00):
only thing that to me that made any sense, which
was to run towards light. And I found a carport
light on in someone's house that I just ran towards.
I didn't know who lived there, but as I was
banging on the back door screaming that I've been raped into,
please please let me in, the neighbors were home. It
happened to be a professor on campus who recognized me,

(16:22):
and she told her husband to let me in, and
they did, and I fainted and they called the police,
and the next thing I knew, you know, I was
being taken to the hospital for a rape kit.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
Wow, thank you for walking us through that. It's such
a harrowing story that you lived through, and it strikes
me just how you were taking meticulous mental notes about everything,
fearing for your life and also at the same time
having a plan what am I going to do once
I get away? It's not like, Okay, the story's over,
You're fine. Obviously, this is the beginning of a huge,

(16:56):
years long situation for you that will involve law enforcement,
the legal system. There's so many people that experience sexual
assaults and are hesitant to make reports, as you know,
because of the situation that you're put into where you're
having to retell your story. Can you talk to us
a little bit about that first experience of having to

(17:17):
tell your story to law enforcement and how was that
for you.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
It's really complicated, and it's incredibly traumatic. I mean, you've
just survived this trauma. Your body's traumatized, your brain's traumatized.
You're going into the hospital to have evidence collected on
your body and in your body. Right, it's like my
body was the crime scene and that's where the evidence is.

(17:43):
And depending on where you go depends on how you're
going to be treated as an assault survivor. This is
nineteen eighty four. There were no such things as sane nurses,
and so the doctor who came in to collect the identification,
the pubic care comings, the cheek swab, your vaginal swab,

(18:03):
your nail clippings, like all the stuff that he's supposed
to do was clearly annoyed and did not want to
be in a hospital collecting evidence off of another rape survivor,
particularly a college girl, and so he haphazardly did that.
But that would also be the location where I knew
and realized that the person who had raped me had

(18:24):
gone on within less than an hour and raped another
woman less than a mile from my home, and when
he had crawled through her den window when she was
sleeping and bit her and slapped her and punched her
and then raped her because I could hear her down
the hall crying. It was also at that moment right
where I really realized that we had a serial rapist
in the community, that women were not safe, and my

(18:49):
hatred was palatable. I could literally taste it in the
back of my throat, how much I hated this person
and wanted him to die for what he had done
to me this other woman, knowing that he was going
to do it again. And so from there I was
taken to the police station and began to give descriptions

(19:10):
of what this person looked like. And as I was
given the description, the detective got a phone call from
I'm not sure who, and then he looked at me
and he said at the hospital. Did they give you
a penicillin shot? And I said no. Did they give
you the morning after pill? And I said no? And
so we realized that they had done an incomplete rape kit.

(19:33):
So I was taken back out to a second hospital
to have a second rape kit collected. You just can't imagine,
like the amount of trauma on my body is now story.
And so after the second rape kit again, I go
back to the police station. It's now been three or
four hours since I almost died, and now I'm being asked,

(19:53):
you know, the questions like how tall was he, how
much did he weigh? What was his hair? And it
was so clear to the police that I had paid
very good attention. They asked if I could do a
composite sketch. The second woman had been beaten and so
she couldn't give us clearer description. So I felt like
a lot of weight and pressure on me to help

(20:15):
the police figure out who this person was. And at
the time, they used something called an identikit, which was
just a big plastic file box that had tabs of
every part of your face, and so the police would
pick up a drawing of the shape of a person's
face and is it this space? And I was like, no,
it's more triangular. And then you'd pick up the second part,

(20:38):
is it more like this face? And same for your
eyebrows and your eyes, and your eyelashes, and your lips,
and your nose and your chin and your cheeks and
your ears and everything that makes up her face. So
you go through these old tabs, and when he was finished,
she said, is this like the man who raped you?
And I said yes, And so that composite sketch went
in the newspaper and the police station started receiving just

(20:59):
a numerous phone but the most important call A woman
called in and said that she had seen a guy
named Ronald Cotton wearing the exact clothing that had been
described outside of my apartment on a bike at three
am on July twenty ninth, same exact time that I
had been raped. So three days after my assault, I

(21:20):
was called into the police station to do a photographic
lineup and they would show me what they referred to
as a six pack, which is three photos on top,
three photos in the bottom, and asked me to take
my time. I don't feel compelled, but if you see him,
pick up the photograph and initial the back and I did.
I took my time, but I picked up photograph number
three and initial the back and they looked at me

(21:42):
and they said, that's who we thought it was.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
Oh wow, the photograph belonged to Ronald Cotton. So you
basically were showing six photographs right picked someone out and
then got a media encouragement from law enforcement. They said, well, yeah,
that's the guy we thought it was.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
When they said that's the guy we thought it was,
how did you feel.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
In that moment when they said that's who we thought
it was. Honestly, it was the first time I could
take a deep breath since the time of the assault.
Is called confirmation. I felt like I had done it right.
I felt like I had been a good survivor. I
felt like I'd been helpful. I felt like the women
in Burlington, North Carolina would be safe again. It was

(22:22):
a huge moment for me. And then about five or
six days after the photographic lineup, I was called again
to come back to the police station. They wanted me
to do a physical lineup, and what I didn't know
at the time was that the room that they would
have normally done the physical lineup in, which is that

(22:43):
room you see in cop shows, right where there's that
one way glass and there's the lineup, but your identity
is protected. That room was being renovated in the police department.
So I was taken to an abandoned schoolhouse to the
second floor and I was into this abandoned school room
where the only thing between me and the lineup was

(23:06):
a folding picnic table. So seven men are marched in
front of me holding numbers, and I was terrified because
I thought, what happens if I don't get this one
right right? Does he walk? Does he go free? Is
he going to come back and kill me? Because it's
broad daylight, there's lights in this room, Like I'm not protected.

(23:29):
It was extremely traumatic. So as I looked through the
seven men in the lineup, honestly, I narrowed it down
to number four and five. And as I started, you know,
looking between four and five, I remember thinking, well, no,
it's number five, and that's what I wrote down on
a piece of paper. And again the police officers looked
at me and said, great job, so you picked out
in the photograph And that was a huge relief. That

(23:52):
would have been you know, middle of August, so he
would of course, be arrested, held over for what they
call probable cause, and we would await trial.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
When you were in that second now photo lineup, do
you recall in that moment if maybe you were consciously
or subconsciously looking to match to the man in the
photo that you had picked out previously, or recalling the
memory of the assault.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
Great question. I've worked in this for a long time now,
so I actually understand what happened to my mind. You know,
I had a very clear picture of who had done
this to me after the assault. But what happens, and
it happens to anybody who is in a place of
trauma like I was, and then you're brought through like
what we call contaminated processes. So as I'm doing that

(24:45):
identicate and I'm looking through the different eyelashes and the
eyebrows and the lips and the noses, my memory at
that moment starts becoming contaminated because the reality is the
person who had assaulted me hours for his eyebrows are
not in that box, his lips are not in that box.

(25:05):
His cheeks and chin that's not in that box. You
have seventy five eyebrows that choose from there's millions of
eyebrows in the world, right, and human beings are not
capable of compartmentalizing the human face. So we look at
your face and totality. I mean, unless you have some
very strange eyebrow, right, you really can't memorize that. And

(25:28):
so by the time I was finished with the composite
sketch and they asked me, was this the man who
attacked you? My memory was now gone, The original memory
was gone, and what is now in place of it
is a composite sketch image. So that when I go
to the photographic lineup, when I'm actually looking to match up,

(25:50):
and it's all completely subconscious, no one knows they're doing
this is you're trying to find the closest photograph to
my last memory, which is a composite sketch. Therefore, Ronald
Cotton's photograph, which was three years old in that lineup,
was the closest photograph to the composite sketch. Our brains

(26:11):
are valuable, and we are so prone to suggestion, and
so things can go into our memory that wasn't there before,
but now it's a permanent fixture in our brain.

Speaker 3 (26:23):
Yeah, So then when you go into the physical lineup.
When you see six men in person, are you then
trying to match to the composite sketch or even to
Ronald Cotton's three year old photo. Is your mind now
using those as references?

Speaker 2 (26:39):
It is, it's scanning all of that, right, you're scanning
your memory banking. What my memory was saying was, oh
my god, that number five looks like I recognize him,
like I'll never forget that face. And of course I
recognize him. I had picked his photograph out of a
lineup the week before. But you don't know that. It's
just the way our work. It's not an intentional thing,

(27:03):
not from the victim's perspective. It may be intentional from
a police officer's perspective, but you don't know you're doing that.
And so when I picked out Ronald in the physical
lineup and again was given confirmation, which is huge, Ronald
Cotton is now a permanent fixture in my mind.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
I'm wondering also, during these two instances of choosing a
photo and then a person that you're standing in front of,
what knowledge did you have in that moment of the
woman who called in and identified Ronald as having been
wearing those clothes at your apartment at three am. Was
that also playing a role in this confirmation you were getting?

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yes, I was told about the phone call. I was
told that Ronald had just been released that spring out
of prison after doing eighteen months for attempted sexual assault.
I was told pretty much everything leadie up to trial.

Speaker 3 (28:02):
Each time Jennifer picked Ronald Cotton out of a lineup,
she received confirmation from law enforcement that she'd chosen their suspect. Additionally,
Ronald Cotton was the only person who appeared in both
the photo and in person lineups. There was also the
woman who called and reported seeing Ronald Cotton outside of

(28:23):
Jennifer's apartment the night of the attack, wearing the same clothes,
the white gloves that Jennifer remembered her attacker wearing. Jennifer
felt confident that Ronald Cotton was the man who raped her.

Speaker 2 (28:38):
The trial was in January of nineteen eighty five. It
would last two weeks. I would testify for two and
a half days. Again, you know, when you think about
the process and what was happening, it's all trauma. My
body was just registering trauma after trauma. Testifying was horrible,
you know, You're having to repeat every graphic thing that

(29:01):
was done to your body in front of strangers, in
front of your family. You're being blamed for the rape
to begin with. It's just what defense attorneys do. I
was told, what did I think would happen when you're
a single woman, living alone and you go to bed
in your underwear? Didn't I know that that's how rapes happened?
You know, it was apparently important for the jury to

(29:23):
know that I was an aerobics instructor, that somehow being
an aerobics instructor was like tantalizing for the entire world.
So it's all this stuff that is being said. The
same time, you know, I'm having to look at the defendant.
I'm looking at his family. I get up to go
to the bathroom and his sister's in the bathroom. It's
really frightening. You don't know what's going to happen. So,

(29:44):
after the two weeks of trial, the jury came back
with guilty on all counts and Ronald was sentenced to
life in fifty four years.

Speaker 3 (29:54):
And what did it feel like when you heard that sentence?

Speaker 2 (29:57):
You know, there's a huge relief. You feel like the
system works like you feel validated, right, this is the
system I've been told my whole life works, and that
was confirmation that there is justice for crime victims and survivors.
And what you don't realize is the narrative and the
pats on the backs that you get of this disclosure.

(30:21):
You get to move on, you can put this behind you,
move forward. Doesn't work. It just doesn't work at all.
And I think people don't really understand that. After trial,
it's kind of like after a death right and everybody's
brought you the cast role. People just go back to
their own lives and you're sitting there and you're thinking, yeah,
but for the rest of my life, I'm still going

(30:42):
to be grieving. They just think that you're going to
be able to start your life again and carry on
as if you're not grieving the loss of what I
had in, who I had been, and what I wanted
to return to, Like that part of my life was
just over and I was left just in this space

(31:05):
alone to try to figure out what's next. And it
was really terrible.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
How are things with your family? Did they go to
the trial? What was that support system like at the time?

Speaker 2 (31:17):
For you? The truth is when you are a victim
of a violent crime. There's not enough support in the world.
So the people who are around you think they're supporting you,
and maybe they're doing the best they can. But unless
you've lived it, if you've never been in it, you

(31:37):
can't really understand what I needed. Tomato super and girl
cheese sandwich wasn't going to cut it. And I also
think that people still don't understand the violent nature of
sexual assault and what that does to the survivor and
to the victims of rape. I think people just think

(31:59):
that you're okay. You're not dead, right, Jennifer. Nobody shot you,
so you're okay, right, Jennifer. I was young, I was
twenty two years old. My family didn't want to talk
to me about it, Like, no one wants to sit
down and talk to you and say, how are you feeling?
What's happening inside of your body? And so no one
asked me questions about it. And my boyfriend was just like, yeah,

(32:21):
I can't deal with you. It's just too much for me.
And friends just don't come over because you cry a
lot and all the time. So you're really left in
this grief because it's what it is. It's grief. You're
left in that grief alone. I didn't do it well.
I just numbed with whatever I could get my hands

(32:45):
on to numb so that I couldn't feel my skin.
Of course, I had to move apartments, and I had
to do that alone. I did graduate, but for the
first time, I made a bee. It sounds crazy, but
I wanted to SRADA student and I made my first beast,
which meant I wasn't going to graduate with a four
point zero, which was my goal. And I wasn't going

(33:07):
to graduate summa cum laude or a valedictorian, which was
my goal. But I graduated, and I didn't go back
to school because I just I couldn't. I couldn't go
to bed at night because I was so afraid. So
the only thing I knew to do was to just
drink like large amounts of alcohol and snort cocaine up
my nose, which meant I couldn't wake up in the morning.

(33:30):
So I was missing work and I was missing class,
and I was a disaster. So I moved. I just
left North Carolina, and I met another person. I fell
in love with him. I came back a year later,
back to North Carolina, got a job in a bank,
and the summer of nineteen eighty seven, I received a
call from the investigator who had been in charge of

(33:53):
the original investigation, Mike Golden, and said that the Pellet
Court of North Carolina had over returned the decision and
that we would have to go back for a second trial.
And I didn't understand any of this, because nobody tells
you this as a victim, right Nobody tells you that
as soon as the trial's over and the convictions happened
and the sentencing takes place, that the defendant automatically has

(34:15):
an appeal, you just think that it's over. So I
didn't understand this appellate process. But the appellate courts had
said that the jury should have known about this second
victim because the first trial was only me, and that
if the courts had known, if the jury had known
there was a second victim who had not made an identification,

(34:35):
then that would have called into question my identification. Ronald
Cotton had been in Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina,
since nineteen eighty five and had been proclaiming his innocence,
and not just his innocence, but that he believed that
there was a man that was serving time in the
same prison, in the same dormitory and worked in the
same kitchen, that had actually committed the crime, a man

(34:58):
named Bobby Pool. So in nineteen eighty seven, during the
second trial, they introduced this person, Bobby Poole, into the
trial and brought him in to court under Vordier. So
they dismissed the jury and asked Bobby Poole if he
had committed this crime, and of course he denied it.
They asked him if he had been bragging about committing

(35:18):
this crime, and he denied ever saying anything about it.
Then they asked both myself and the second survivor if
we recognized him, and both of us said no, we
did not recognize him. And did we recognize anyone in
the courtroom that had committed the crimes. Both of us
pointed out Ronald Cotton, and so in this second trial,

(35:39):
Ronald would now be found guilty of both first ree rapes,
and this time Ronald would be sentenced re sentenced to
two life sentences and thirty years in prison, which meant
he would absolutely die in prison.

Speaker 3 (35:54):
Did it feel final at that point to you, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
I thought it was final, But of course I thought
it was final the first time. Most of us don't
know the legal process. And because they always tell you
this word closure, now you really get closure, which I
really wish people would stop using that word, because there
is no such thing as closure. I thought this was
going to be it, like, we're done. Now, I get
to move on and do my life now, right, We're.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
Going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
I got married, I got pregnant. I had triplets in
the spring of nineteen ninety and honestly, the triplets were
my reason to not die every single day, and it
gave me a task. It gave me a job, It
gave me structure because you're a mom. You can't die
now there's these three little people who need you. And

(36:51):
I really loved that part of my life of being
a young mother to these incredible babies, and life took
on a pattern. The rape was never far from my
mind or my spirit. He was always there. But you know,
triplet's keep you busy, So that's how I was busy.

(37:12):
And then the spring of nineteen ninety five happened. I
got the phone call again from Mike Galden and it's
now been almost eleven years and he calls me and says, hey, like,
I need to come and see you. I'm bringing the
Assistant District Attorney of Alamance County with me, and I
was like, okay, you know that's fine. They came to

(37:34):
my house and started telling me about the fact that
Ronald was still saying he was innocent, but they assured
me that he was not. They were like, we know
we've got the right guy, we know he did it,
but they want to have this DNA test. This is
North Carolina, this is nineteen ninety five. DNA was really
a very new piece of investigation. Very few people were

(37:58):
talking about it. The only thing I had ever heard
about DNA other than through my science classes was OJ Simpson.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
DNA testing has been admissible in court since nineteen eighty seven,
but the first time that most Americans were introduced to
the idea of DNA playing a role in the criminal
justice system was in nineteen ninety five during the highly
televised OJ Simpson trial.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
So they said that North Carolina didn't have any statutes
to allow this DNA test to go through, but if
the court ordered it, my blood sample from eleven years
ago had now disintegrated and now would have to give
a new blood sample. And I just looked at them
and I said, look, I have five year old triplets.
I cannot go through another court anything like. I just can't.

(38:47):
And I said, at some point this has to be over.
We're going to go to the doctor right now and
he's going to give you my blood and you're going
to run that test because this has to be done.
And they agreed has to be done. So I went
to the doctor and I had my doctor, my doctor
draw my blood and give it to them, and it

(39:08):
went down. I forty headed to Raleigh, North Carolina, to
the State Buer of Investigations Crime Lab. That would be
March of ninety five. And I will tell you in truth,
in all honesty, I didn't really worry about it because
I had been assured that it would come back and
conclusively point to the fact that it had been Ronald
all along. And then they called me the first week

(39:29):
of June and stood in my kitchen and said that
the DNA did not belong to Ronald Cotton, that it
did belong to Bobby Poole.

Speaker 3 (39:40):
Bobby Poole's DNA matched blood collected from Mary Reynolds home,
the second victim who was attacked the same night as Jennifer.
Investigators confronted Bobby Pool with the results of the DNA
test and he confessed to raping both Mary Reynolds and
Jennifer Thompson.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
I mean, how did you even take that in?

Speaker 2 (39:59):
For me?

Speaker 1 (40:00):
In what did you think?

Speaker 2 (40:03):
Honestly, I don't know that I did. I know that
I fell, and I know that I screamed and cried
for a long time. There were so many emotions that
were happening that it's hard to kind of sparse out.
There's the disbelief, there's the anger, there's the fear, there's

(40:25):
the confusion. I felt paralyzed. I felt isolated, I felt fearful.
I felt everything you can possibly imagine. I don't understand this.
I don't understand, like, how did this happen? I remember
Mike Golden and Rob Johnson, who is the ADA, look
at me and say, we're going to get Ronald out

(40:48):
of prison as quickly as we can. We don't want
him to spend another day in prison. He doesn't and
shouldn't be. But they also told me that before they
would even deliver this news to me, they made sure
that they got a confession from Bobby Pool, which for
them was really important, and they said it took six
hours for him to finally say, okay, fine, I did
that to these women and they didn't just do it

(41:10):
to us, like you know. It would come to light
that he had committed twenty four more violent crimes before
he was ever apprehended, six of which would be first
to gree rapes, and one of the rapes he committed,
he went back and raped the woman a second time.
And so there's a lot of things that you're now
having to reconcile that Ronald Cotton was in prison for

(41:33):
eleven years for something he never did, and that Bobby
Pool was not apprehended when he should have been, and
that all these other people were harmed because the system failed.
But what isn't being told to me is that the
system failed me too. But that wasn't the story that

(41:57):
the public heard for the next few years.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
Current research on eyewitness identification shows that when victims are
presented with the police lineup, the overwhelming majority of people
will choose someone from that lineup, regardless of if the
actual perpetrator is present. If the perpetrator is not in
the lineup, they will choose the person who looks most
similar to their memory of the perpetrator. All of this

(42:24):
happens subconsciously. It's important to note that Bobby Pool's photo
was not part of the initial photo lineup that Jennifer
was shown. He was also not at the physical lineup.
Jennifer id'd Ronald Cotton twice before the trial, during the trial,
and then again in nineteen eighty seven when he was retried.

(42:45):
Bobby Poole, her actual rapist, was there in nineteen eighty
seven at the retrial in the courtroom with Jennifer, but
she did not recognize him. Her brain had replaced any
memory of Bobby Poole's face with Ronald Cotton's.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
The story that came out over the course of the
years that followed did not reflect that you were also
a victim of this system.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
Did you have any.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
Preparation or warning from the ADA or the law enforcement
you were working with, like there's going to be media
coverage about this.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
I was told there would be media coverage again, you know,
this is nineteen ninety five. Ronald was the twenty third
person I believe in the United States to have been
exonerated using DNA. He was the first person in the
state of North Carolina to be exonerated through DNA, but
it was the first time that a DNA test had
also revealed the actual perpetrator. So it was an enormous

(43:45):
story across the country, and it was being covered by
every news cast that you can possibly imagine. And so
I was told that there was going to be a
lot of coverage, that they would try to protect my
name because you know, I'd been married since then. But
at this point, nobody understood what was happening to crime

(44:05):
victims and survivors from these cases. I was really left
on my own to try to navigate the next few
years of false narratives that were going to be coming out.
So what I decided to do at that time was
in many ways, to just erase myself from the world

(44:26):
and to make myself as microscopically tiny so that the
world couldn't find me. And I did a really good job,
I have to say, like I really kind of like
disappeared for the next year until somebody found me.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
Who found you?

Speaker 2 (44:41):
What had happened was there was a producer with Frontline
who wanted to do a documentary about eyewitness identification and
the fallibility of human memory, and this person contacted Barry Sheck,
and Barry Sheck was like, there's this story out of
North Carolina. Can find the girl. So people started trying

(45:02):
to find the girl, and eventually they did. It was
really scary because I was getting phone calls from people
that I knew that said, yeah, I've got this phone
call today, and somebody said, do you know this girl
named Jennifer Thompson And it's Jennifer Thompson Jennifer Canino and
so people were calling me and that scared me. But
eventually Ben Loderman, who was a producer, contacted me, flew

(45:24):
down from Boston, sat with me in my house and said,
this is what I'm going to do. I would really
love you to tell your story. And of course my
first impulse was like, oh, hell, no, no way, no way,
I'm going to do this. My kids now are six
and people are going to try to find me and
kill me. Then he said, well, I've talked to Ronald

(45:44):
and he's going to tell his story. And I knew
very quickly that no one could tell my story but me,
because you're not allowed to tell my story. I lived
it so I agreed to tell it under the understanding
that Ronald stay in Burlington and I was in Winston
Sale and that we weren't going to meet, and he agreed,
and so over the next six months is he put

(46:05):
together this documentary titled What Jennifer Saw. The crew would
say to me like, oh, you know with ron yesterday,
he's such a nice guy. He's like really chill, he's
really lovely, he's very forgiving, and I was like, yeah,
there's no way that can be true. The guy spent
eleven years in prison for something he didn't do. There
is no way. The documentary aired in February of ninety seven,

(46:27):
and I remember watching it the next morning and I
heard myself say that I know that he's innocent, but
I still see him in my nightmares. And that's when
it clicked for me about this is a permanent face
in my brain and it shouldn't be there. Bobby Pool
should be there. But why can't I see him in
my brain? Because I can't. So I called Mike Galdon

(46:49):
and I said, can you set up a meeting? I
don't even want to know where I'm meeting Because every
journalist in the country was now trying to find me.
When I tell you, every journalist in the country was
trying to find me, I mean everybody. So they set
it up a private meeting, and I met Ronald in
April ninety seven, not far from where I'd been raped
thirteen years before. We started to cry and talk about

(47:14):
what had happened to the two of us. We got
to ask each other questions that only the other person
knew the answers to, and we spent the next two
hours just crying and talking and holding each other's hands
and sharing about what those years had been like for ourselves,
for our families. And what we realized at the end
of those two hours is that we had a lot

(47:35):
of shared trauma because the system had failed us, and
that at the intersection of all of that trauma was
Bobby Pool, who had caused every single bit of it.
Bobby Pool had done so much violence and it hurt
so many women, But he also sat back and knew
that Ronald was going to prison for what he had

(47:56):
done to all of us. And so that was where
ron and I were able to began this healing process
with each other, understanding that the system had failed us
and our families and that Bobby Pool had been the
perpetrator of all of it.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
When you met Ronald for the first time, you know,
how was he different than what you had maybe feared
or imagined he might be.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
Like, well, in my head, of course, he was just
this terrible, violent monster. In reality, he was incredibly gentle
and self spoken. He was huge, Like that was the
other thing, Like he was enormous. He's like six foot four,
I'm five foot one. He was like this big, huge
person in my life, and yet he was very soft
spoken and very gentle and kind and funny and safe,

(48:43):
Like I immediately felt safe with him. It was a
complete and utter shift, and we immediately became friends that day,
Like we parted in each other's arms, sharing each other's
contact information, and promised that we had lived this journey,
we had survived this thing together, and this was our story.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
It sounds like you really did become friends with him.
You both were really going through it in different ways,
in different scenarios. Right over those eleven years, you talked
about having your children and that being something that helped
you want to live. You were so tormented. Was this
helpful in any kind of way to move toward healing?
For you and how if so.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
I think it was helpful on many many levels. So yes,
it was very helpful in the healing process because Ronald
was probably the only person who could understand in this
weird way what I had gone through because both of
us had lost, both of us could not return to
the former person that we were before both of us grieved,

(49:54):
and so we had these shared experiences, different but shared experiences,
and that was really healing for me and for him.
The other thing that I think it did for me
is it sent me on a quest on mini quests.
One of the quests I went on was to understand

(50:16):
the criminal justice system and the legal system and how
it actually works and who it actually works for and
who does it actually fail and fail often. So that
forced me to really look back on my childhood and
my life of growing up in the segregated South and

(50:37):
that kind of birthright of thinking that the system was
the best in the world and it was effective and
it worked. And that completely shifted everything from me and
I began to question everything. It wasn't just like criminal
justice system processes, but environmental justice and economic justice like.
It really started me thinking and studying and understanding and

(50:59):
pulling back layers and asking the deep, really hard questions,
which I hope I never stop asking those questions. The
other thing that it did for me was to begin
to understand memory and trauma and how those two work,
and how often the system can get it wrong, and
when it gets it wrong, how many people are being

(51:20):
harmed by it. Like, it really got me thinking about
our brains and how trauma works and doesn't work, and
what we can encode and what we can encode under
what circumstances. So I've done a lot of work in
that area and then on policy and legislation, So that's
taken me in lots of different areas to kind of

(51:40):
help improve our system. But then the other thing it
did was really help me understand restorative justice and how
healing happens, and how healing often doesn't happen because we
don't give space for it.

Speaker 3 (51:55):
Did you experience people blaming you and how did you
come to understand how to sort that all in your
head and where to place the blame.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
It was an easy assigning of blame, right, It was
like the quick answer. I was like the very quick
and easy scapegoat for all of this. So I was
very much blamed for well, I still am. Let's just
be clear, like I'm still being blamed. I won't allow
it anymore. That's the difference. I allow the blame to
take place, for gosh, the good twelve to fifteen years

(52:27):
after Ronald and I met, because I didn't have a
different language, and because the system was very happy to
allow me to carry the bag of blame, and so yeah,
the general public wanted to blame me, the criminal justice
system was happy for me to accept the blame.

Speaker 3 (52:45):
Over the following years, Jennifer and Ronald gave many talks
together and were interviewed dozens of times. They would eventually
go on to co author a book, Picking Cotton, in
two thousand and nine. Jennifer writes in that book about
the overwhelming guilt she felt for misidentifying Ronald. She also
notes that that guilt did not assuage the trauma she

(53:08):
was already experiencing from being violently attacked in her home
at age twenty two. But suddenly, in the public's eye,
she was no longer a victim.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
The blame could look as innocuous as ron and I
are staying it on a stage and somebody throws her
hand up and says, wow, Ron Man, you're like Jesus Christ,
You're just like Jesus, Like, how do you stand next
to her and be her friend and forgiver? And for
a long time I was like, I just I guess

(53:40):
I'm just going to have to take this. I now
push back on that a lot, But that's the innocuous stuff, right.
The more in my face violent blame would be the
death threats, men saying things to me about rape, such
as one man looked at me and said, you know,
I got to say, like, at least the son of

(54:02):
a bitch that raped you had good taste. Those were
the things I've heard for decades, and that's traumatic. And
I didn't know that I didn't have to carry that,
that I could deny that, that I could say that's
not true and that's not right. And here's why. And
you know, somebody listened to this podcast. I will promise
you there will be somebody listen to this podcast. It's

(54:23):
going to want to comment at the end of this
and say, you know, Jennifer should die, Jennifer should go
to prison, because this person's not going to think deep
enough and far enough to say, wow, like if I
was being raped and almost murdered. You know, what would
I do? What would I say to my mother if
this was her story? Like, what would I say to
my daughter if this was my daughter's story? Would I

(54:44):
blame my daughter? No, you wouldn't blame your daughter. I
would hope you wouldn't blame your daughter.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
Yeah, then your story gets lost in the fray because
thinking back about like how from the moment that you know,
you didn't know his name yet, but Bobby Pool was
in your apartment. The police even called you like the
perfect victim because you were so you were doing your
very best. The whole time you were studying him. You
were planning on how do I get justice? Not just

(55:10):
for yourself at first it was, but then also for
other victims as well. Then you were getting confirmation the
whole time. And so when you really stop and think
about it, it's like, what did people want you to
do differently? There was nothing you could have done differently.

Speaker 1 (55:25):
The woman who called and identified Ronald as being in
front of your apartment complex at around three in the morning,
wearing the same clothing. Your trauma and the ability of
your memory to be so manipulated by the way the
system was operating as you're telling me that, I'm like,
I get that. That makes total sense. Her recollection of

(55:48):
that is escaping me. Did you ever learn anything about
what gave her that level of conviction to call and
say that?

Speaker 2 (55:56):
Yeah? And I really appreciate you asking that question, because
ron and I did not understand this until the book
was published. And this woman came to visit Ronald and
said that she had been given a type statement from
another police officer to call in in exchange for drug
charges against she and her son to be dropped.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
Oh my god, that's mind blowing. It's actually worse than
anything I thought you were going to say.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
Yeah, yeah, And neither one of us knew about that
phone call, obviously, And the police officer who gave her
the type statement was not Mike Golden. It was another
police officer who had just always had it against Ronald.
He'd always hated Ronald, and ron talked about like when
he I don't know how old he was, he was

(56:42):
probably around twelve. This particular officer said to him, one
of these days, I'm going to get you. And they said,
you think you're a tough I'm not going to use
the word going around dating white women, and he said,
but I'm going to get your ass one day. And
that was the cop.

Speaker 3 (56:59):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
Yeah. And you know, when we tell that story and
people will often ask me about that call, because that
call was really important. It's what put Ron in the crosshairs.
When we tell people that, people always have the shock
and awe right, it's like, oh my god, I cannot
tell you how many of these stories have something like
that built in. There's like this bad actor and so

(57:24):
again it's like this kind of knee jerk reaction to
blame people. Yeah, there are people that should be blamed, absolutely,
but it is not crime victims and survivors.

Speaker 3 (57:36):
We've all seen the news stories of someone being exonerated,
walking down the steps of a courthouse, finally free. It
is beyond horrifying that any innocent person is sent to prison,
losing potentially years of their life for something they didn't do,
and exonerations become a celebration that justice has finally prevailed.

(57:57):
But the harm of wrongful conviction runs deep. There's no
getting those years in prison back. And what we often
don't think about is the ripple effect of this kind
of system failure. There is the original crime victim, often
still waiting for justice. Jennifer has worked with people who
were victims of violent crimes who believed that their perpetrators

(58:20):
had been caught, and then years later the case is
reopened and still unsolved.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
No crime victim and no crime survivor, no marter victim
family member wants an innocent person to go to prison. Ever,
right like we want the person who violently removed our
family members from this earth. We want the person who
violated our bodies and left us for dead somewhere. We
want that person to be apprehended and going to prison.

(58:48):
We don't want an innocent person to go to prison,
But for some reason, that gets lost in the conversation.
Right And I think there's certain words that every victim
and crime survivor from these cases that I've worked with
will tell you. They feel isolated, They feel marginalized, They
feel unnoticed that there was no one there for them
at the time of the crime. There was no one

(59:10):
there for them during the trial, there was no one
there for them during the exoneration. These are consistent themes
that we see with every victim and survivor, because when
an exoneration happens and you pick up the newspaper or
you listen to the story on the news. What you
don't hear about is who the victims and survivors were.

(59:31):
It's only about the exonery. And that is not to
say that the exonerated person that their story should not
be highlighted because it's horrific and what was done to
them and what those years look like is absolutely not okay.
They suffered decades, decades of being separated from their families,

(59:53):
of watching their children grow up without them, of people
dying and they couldn't be there to grieve them. They
were physically assaulted in prison. They come out with absolutely
no resources. Their families are broken. The system failed them.
That's absolutely across the board. Yes, and the victims and survivors,

(01:00:13):
many of them, their children grew up without them because
they can't function. People are brutally kidnapped and tortured and murdered,
and that these families have to reconcile that the last
moments of their child, their wife, their brother, their mother
on this earth was torture. And then the system comes

(01:00:36):
behind it and says, oh, by the way, the person
we thought that did this to you or your family
member didn't and we have no interest in closing the
case ever, and so you're never going to know, or
if you're a rape survivor, they come back and say, oh,
and by the way, we know who did it to you,
but the statute of limitations have taken place, and the

(01:00:56):
guy who raped you and sandomized you lives an hour
down the road, but we can't prosecute him because you
live in a state that has statute of limitations. So sorry,
That's what people need to understand. The system when it
fails in a wrongful conviction, fails all of us. It's
not just me and Ronald, but the community got failed.

(01:01:17):
It was failed, and the only person who wins in
any of these cases is the perpetrator. There are no winners.
And so when I would meet with crime victims and survivors,
that was really kind of where we all were. It
was this place of the system failed us, and now
the system wants to blame us, and then we hear
exneries of course being blamed. We have a lot of

(01:01:39):
people that will look at me and say, yeah, but
you know, the guy was like, he was using drugs
and he was in the bad part of town. It's like,
that doesn't mean that innocent people should go to prison.
I mean it was nineteen eighty four, and best practices
back then were archaic. I often when I do speeches,
I will tell people that, you know, the medical profession
is always updating, right, It's always trying to get better processes,

(01:02:02):
better procedures, and to cut down on you know, infections
and whatever. But the criminal justice system hasn't caught up
like that. And so I'll often ask an audience if
somebody came to you and said you have to have
open heart surgery, I can do it like we did
in nineteen thirty seven, or I can do it like
we do now in twenty twenty five. Which would you choose.

(01:02:23):
I would imagine close to one hundred percent of people
are going to say, oh, can we do it like
you know now? You know what we know now? But
our legal system still operates and in a very very
old fashioned, archaic wild West. I'm the marshal of this town.
Don't tell me what to do. Way, And I travel

(01:02:46):
and I do a lot of legislation in different states
and in different jurisdictions. And I will tell you that
there are police departments in this country today that just
refuse to do best practices as it relates to eyewitness
identification procedures, which we have, we know better ways to
do it. It's just like, don't tell me what to do.
It's about closing the case and listen. There's a lot

(01:03:09):
of people that will say, well, listen, the guy's a
bad guy. He was a bad guy, and it's like, Okay,
he might have been a bad guy, but don't we
want the right bad guy. I mean, that's really important.

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
Yeah, it is an interesting part, and it's covered in
the book that Ronald did have a criminal history, and
so some people could look at him and say, oh,
that's a bad guy. But there were so many factors
obviously that played into that that you also described of
sort of the environment of the place where also he
grew up and being a black kid and then a
black man in that environment and not really being set

(01:03:41):
up to succeed. And it's so clear based on who
he became that he's a wonderful guy. So you know,
it just adds another layer of complication, and it always
just reminds me. It reminds me of what you said earlier,
where you were like the general public likes to have
an easy person to blame or an easy answer. Things
are so one way or the other, and it's like
that's just really not often how real life is.

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
It's often very very gray. And I think most of
us want to believe that if I lived in this
certain circumstance that I wouldn't behave that way, But you
don't know that. And the other part of at least
my experience, is that we live in a very disposable
society where we just want to toss people away and

(01:04:23):
not look at them, and prison has done that for us.
It's created a huge problem in this country where we
have systematically put you know, entire groups of people in
certain buckets. There's a reason why prisons are not beside
country clubs and golf courses, because what you don't see
doesn't exist. And so for people that look like me,

(01:04:44):
that makes us feel better about the world we live in.
But I will tell you that I've met many, many, many,
many hundreds and hundreds of people that have been locked
away behind bars, many of them innocent, but some of
them not. And we have wasted tremendous talent and until
life and gifts and creativity by just blanket putting people

(01:05:06):
in prison, and we've certainly not created a safer world
to live in.

Speaker 3 (01:05:11):
What is the mission of healing justice? We're going to work?

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
Do you do well? Healing Justice? We're ten years old
this year, and really it was born from this place
where I had already experienced, and where I was around
communities of victims and survivors and ex honeries, and I
kept hearing about these terrible stories of the aftermath. Right like,
after the exoneration happens, everybody thinks that the ex honery

(01:05:35):
is going to get ten million dollars or the case
is going to be solved, and that's simply not true.
So I started Healing Justice in an attempt to try
to bring people together who had been equally hurt and
harmed into a space to use restorative justice principles to
help us all talk about what had happened so we
could engage in healing. And so we really do kind

(01:05:58):
of two things. I mean, I are too big. Missions
are to address the harm caused by wrongful convictions and
to help educate the system in ways that we can
do better, particularly by crime victims and survivors, and what
that looks like. The other part of The work we
do is bringing directly impacted individuals together to create connections

(01:06:20):
and community and help people engage in what healing looks like.
So we do that different ways. We do that through
peer support, we do that through our healing retreats, we
do that through listening sessions. And it's in the space
of community that belonging starts happening, and belonging is where
we can create the healing. If we don't feel like

(01:06:41):
we belong, there's no way we can heal. We can't
heal in isolation. There's just no way. We heal in community,
and we heal when we're heard. We can heal when
we can see each other.

Speaker 3 (01:06:56):
I am so glad that Jennifer came on our podcast
and told her story.

Speaker 1 (01:07:01):
That was so powerful because it impacted her life in
so many ways, and then she sort of turned that
situation on its head to do a lot of good,
which brings us to Healing Justice Project. The Healing Justice
Project provides crime victims and ex hoonneries with resources and
community for healing.

Speaker 3 (01:07:20):
Yeah you can visit them at Healing Justiceproject dot org
and they also hold these retreats in which crime victims
and exoneries are able to come together, meet each other
and heal together, is kind of how Jennifer would describe it.
There's a video on their website from one of these retreats.

(01:07:41):
It's really powerful to watch. I think that one of
the things that really stood out to me and Jennifer's
interview is talking about how being a crime victim and
going through this experience of a wrongful conviction it really
left her feeling alone and like pitted her against Ronald
Cotton in a way. Once they met each other, she

(01:08:02):
really felt like there was community that started to be
built and healing from that. And so she took that
inspiration and used it to create these retreats where she
brings crime victims and xuneries together, not usually from the
same case, but she said that it really helps for
people to talk to someone, for someone maybe whose family
member was murdered, to be able to speak with an

(01:08:24):
ex Honay who was wrongfully convicted for a murder, and
so she facilitates those conversations and I think that's just
really unique and cool. It's a powerful video, yeah, and
it really speaks to you know. In the interview, Jennifer
said when the system fails to convict the right person,
then they feel everyone involved. Yeah, and then I have
to mention. So Jennifer and Ronald Cotton co authored a book.

(01:08:49):
She mentions it in the interview. It's called Picking Cotton,
Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption, and it's really good.
We wanted to speak with Ronald, he is spending time
with his family and did not want to do an interview,
which we totally understand. But half of the book is
written from Jennifer's perspective, and then half of it is
written from Ronald's perspective. So there's a whole other part

(01:09:12):
of this story in the book that if you wanted
to hear it, definitely go check it out. There's obviously
so much in here from Ronald's perspective that we can't cover.
People should just read the book. But one of the
stories floored me. He was in North Carolina Central Prison
and he talks about being mistaken for this other guy,

(01:09:34):
Bobby Pool, like even the guards called him Pool, Hey Pool,
and he was like, that's not me. So he meets
this guy Bobby Pool in prison, who we now know
was the actual assailant of Jennifer's and Ronald sees him
and says that he looks like the sketch, the original sketch,

(01:09:55):
and kind of looks like Ronald as well, and he,
you know, confronts him. And then at some point Ronald's
sister comes to visit him, and he said that he
had this creepy interaction where Bobby Pool came up to
him afterward and was like, Hey, can I get your
sister's address so I can write her? And quick thinking
as he was, he was like, you know, she probably

(01:10:17):
wouldn't write you, but what I can do is we
could take a picture together and I could send it
to her and maybe she'll want to write you. So
he said, for two dollars, you could get like a
polaroid picture. In the book, it shows the polaroid picture
of Ronald Cotton and Bobby Pool. And then, of course
he didn't send it to his sister. He sent it
to his attorney. He was sent instant in January of

(01:10:38):
nineteen eighty five to life in prison plus fifty years.
He meets Bobby Pool in nineteen eighty six and takes
this photo in September of nineteen eighty six and sends
it to his attorney. But he still spends, you know,
nine more years in prison before he's exonerated, and the
whole time he was like, I know, it's this guy

(01:10:59):
Bobby Pool, and he was right.

Speaker 1 (01:11:00):
That is unimaginable.

Speaker 3 (01:11:01):
It's a really good book. Jennifer and Ronald both talk
in the book about a lot of their activism that
they have done together over the years, speaking at different
events and working together to try to raise awareness about
wrongful convictions.

Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
Right because there are a lot of people in prison
and proclaiming their innocence, and now having gone through this experience,
they're making sure those people have a voice. According to
the Innocence Project, they have two hundred and three clients
that have been exonerated by DNA evidence, and sixty three
percent of wrongful convictions that they've worked on involved eyewitness misidentification,

(01:11:40):
which is exactly how Ronald Cotton ended up in prison.

Speaker 3 (01:11:46):
That's a staggering percentage. Sixty three percent involved eyewitness misidentification,
and yet from everything that we've learned, it makes sense.
So the lead detective Mike Golden, who Jennifer's about, he
actually went on to transform the way that North Carolina
approaches lineups and was really influential in instituting double blind

(01:12:10):
procedures so that the lead investigators in the case are
no longer the people who are there with a eyewitness
making the identifications.

Speaker 1 (01:12:19):
Oh, it's like now it has to be a more
unbiased person being the middleman there.

Speaker 3 (01:12:23):
That's great. Yeah, so that you don't have that situation
where someone is giving that confirmation and saying, yes, that's
our suspect, right and reaffirming it.

Speaker 1 (01:12:32):
Yeah, because then she went on to misidentify him again
because of that. Yeah, the fact that like she identified
him again in court and then again at the retrial
when Bobby Pool was actually there, she didn't recognize him.
That just says so much about what our brains and
memory does that there's so much that's unreliable really about

(01:12:53):
eyewitness identification. You know, Jennifer had this added pressure because
the other victim, who we now know to be Bobby Poll,
said no, I cannot provide eyewitness testimony. She was unable
to say what he looked like, and so Jennifer was
being reaffirmed by investigators and also this idea that she
was helping the other victim.

Speaker 3 (01:13:14):
Yeah. Well, thanks for listening, and we will be back
next week for an off record.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
If you have a story for us, we would love
to hear it. Our email is The Knife at exactlyrightmedia
dot com, or you can follow us on Instagram at
the Knife Podcast or Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:13:31):
This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith.

Speaker 2 (01:13:35):
And me Paytia Eaton.

Speaker 1 (01:13:37):
Our producers are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Samarosi. This episode
was mixed by Tom Bryfogel. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

Speaker 3 (01:13:45):
Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.

Speaker 1 (01:13:47):
Artwork fi Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 3 (01:13:49):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.