Update and Jennifer Thompson ReRelease

Patia and Hannah share a behind-the-scenes update. Then, one of our favorite episodes from the archives - A 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.
The claims and opinions in this podcast are those of
the speaker and do not necessarily represent the Knife or
exactly Right Media. Hi Patia, Hey Hannah. Well, it has
been a week. It has been a week, and it

(00:22):
has been a morning. It really has. We have an
update for you to start it off. I'll just say
we had an episode that was going to come out
this week. We were really excited about it. We worked
really hard on it and felt really strongly about it,
but we have hit a major roadblock. Yeah. So what
happened is we were working on a you know, I

(00:44):
guess you call it like a partially wrong full conviction story.
A man who in his early twenties in the nineteen
nineties was convicted on multiple charges, one of those including
the murder of a young woman, and it was he
and his friend who were both charged with the murder,

(01:04):
among other charges related to what happened that night. And
so in two thousand and two it came out that
the person who he was with that night took full
responsibility for the murder, which is what had been his
story all along. And then in two thousand and eight,
there was an evidentiary hearing where he went on record

(01:25):
and said it. And so since two thousand and eight,
this person who we were doing this story about.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Who was convicted of first degree murder and had always said,
you know, admitted that he was there but that he
actually didn't participate in the murder at all, tried to
stop it, and he'd been claiming his innocence in that regard,
but had been convicted and was serving a sentence of
eighty two years.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yeah, and so he got a lot of support following
this person coming out and taking full responsibility for her death,
not for what took place after, but for her death.
He finally, after five parole hearings yesterday, was granted parole.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
We actually did the interview in December of twenty twenty
five and have been working on it, and you know,
at that point, part of the reason for doing the
story was to raise awareness of his case. Like we've
done other wrongful conviction stories in the past. There was
a lot of from our perspective, a lot of evidence
that this man was wrongfully convicted and had already served

(02:28):
thirty one years in prison. But it's really hard to
get someone out of the prison system once they're in it,
even when you have really compelling information that shows that
they were, you know, wrongfully convicted. And so we spoke
with one of the members of his team about his
case in hopes that it would help to raise more awareness.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
So we did all this work and then literally the
week that it's supposed to come out, he gets a
parole hearing, which amazing, incredible for him. Right, And you
attended the parole hearing.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah, I attended. Virtually there were five people on the
parole board. Three gave him yes's and two were nos.
And the two people who dissented or said no felt
really strongly about it. And one of those reasons, understandably,
is that this has caused the victim's family immeasurable pain,

(03:20):
you know, a loss that cannot be undone. And so
because this person who has been in prison has gotten
a lot of support, an unfortunate fallout of that is
that sometimes his supporters had reached out to her family
and caused the victims family the victim's family and caused
her additional distress. And so we didn't know what was happening,

(03:41):
and we certainly didn't reach out certainly not and would
not ever agree with that, right because you know, she
is at the center of the story. She is the
person whose life was taken, and so you know, it
was said at the parole hearing and afterward privately that
any mention of her could jeopardize this parole in the press.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah, and since we interviewed one of his supporters, us
airing the episode with her talking about this case could
actually jeopardize this man's parole, right.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
And you know, some things are more important than the podcasting.
And so Hannah and I are aligned on that it
wasn't the right decision to air the episode this week,
and we feel really strongly about people who aren't either
wrongfully convicted or have done their time and deserve to
be paroled, And so we're going to run another episode.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, And I just want to say, like our show, ultimately,
we're not ignorant to the fact that this is entertainment,
but we've always also wanted it to be more than that,
which is why we do the research and try to
present information to people and be educational as well. We
also really like to highlight cases where there's an injustice

(04:58):
and hopes that that injustice could be righted. And when
we first recorded the episode, it felt like that, it
felt like, this feels really good to get this information
out there. At this point, releasing it would really just
do the opposite of that, and so it goes against
our personal ethics and the ethics of the show. Even
though it's a bummer because we love the episode and

(05:19):
we're hopeful that maybe as time goes by it could
resolve that we would safely be able to put it out.
That is our hope, but for now we're going to
hold off.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
Yes, And you know, just to add to that, it's like,
you know, we're working on the true crime space, but
we have this mission driven perspective on true crime, and
when we're telling stories, we look for those opportunities where
they exist, and sometimes that requires flexibility.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
And so here we are, and so, like you said,
we decided that we're going to re release an older episode.
It feels appropriate. It is also a story about a
wrongful conviction. It was an early episode and it is
an interview with Jennifer Thompson. It's honestly one of my.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
It's an incredible story and we have so many new
listeners since we aired that episode that I'm hopeful it
will be an exciting listen for everyone who sticks with us.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Yeah, and we will be back next week with a
brand new episode. Thanks for being here.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
I remember thinking about what it would feel like to die,
and I remember wondering how much it will hurt.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
Welcome to the Knife. I'm Hannah Smith.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
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 2 (06:56):
Jennifer's life changed forever when, at twenty two years old,
she became I'm 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.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
Our conversation with Jennifer took place on February twenty first,
twenty twenty five. Let's get into the interview.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
Hi, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us on
the podcast.

Speaker 3 (07:30):
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
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 3 (07:41):
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

(08:02):
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

(08:23):
Salem is a town where RG Rentals Tobacco company was founded,
Haines 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

(08:43):
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 we're given certain things almost as a birthright.

(09:07):
You know that the criminal justice system works, and it's effective,
and 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, you were absolutely guilty of a crime. You're

(09:28):
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 at Elon College in nineteen eighty three.

(09:50):
I felt like I had found my footing, maybe for
the first time really ever. And I was also dating,
you know what, would have been a very respectable young man,
and in my family's eyes, that was important. Right women
were to marry a respectable man. And he checked all
the boxes and so in nineteen eighty three, I was

(10:11):
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 was a very hot day.
I mean July in the South, the humidity is unfathomable.

(10:33):
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, and we did,
and the rest of the day was kind of, you know,

(10:54):
a typical twenty two year old college student day. He
took me back home later that after noon 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 picked me up probably around
six o'clock and took.

Speaker 4 (11:14):
Me to 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 O la carte restaurant.

Speaker 3 (11:33):
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 it did. I sat down and began to consume
just vast amounts of sodium laced products. But because I'd
been dehydrated earlier in the day, it hit really hard
and I came down with a massive headache, just massive,

(11:55):
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, gave 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

(12:16):
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

(12:40):
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,
you could not hear anything. Therefore, I did not hear
him leave. But I also didn't hear police sirens that
were all throughout my apartment complex at midnight. They were

(13:00):
searching for a man who had attempted to break into
my neighbor's apartment across the parking lot. He had broken
the kitchen door window, and 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

(13:25):
called the police. He heard her call the police, and
she told the police officers that he had on a
white neck 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

(13:49):
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
if you heard it. Do you go back to sleep
or do you wake up and try to identify a

(14:10):
noise right which is really frightening, particularly 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

(14:31):
he had 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

(14:52):
he was 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 2 (14:59):
We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
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 where he would kill me.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
So terrifying.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
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,

(15:46):
you actually don't know what you would do. The same
applies for the ability to kind of make an eyewitness identification.
Everybody thinks it 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 2 (16:06):
What was going through your mind? Was it just I
got to survive this?

Speaker 3 (16:11):
You know, There's a couple of things that went in
my mind. I mean, the initial thing, obviously that went
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

(16:32):
probably done this before. So for me, the first thing
that went through my mind was do not physically fight,
because you're gonna die. And I remember thinking about what
it would feel like to die, and I remember wondering

(16:52):
how much it will hurt, and is it going 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.

(17:14):
But then I hate bullies, and I've 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

(17:35):
and think. And so I remember thinking to myself, like, Jennifer,
you're smart. You've not been drinking, 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,

(17:58):
Listen to everything he says. 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, tattoos 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

(18:19):
attention to. It was at the point when he tried
to kiss me that I was going to 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.

(18:41):
And I 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 dying just shifted right there, so

(19:03):
I was able to get him off of me. I
was able to grab a blanket off the edge of
my bed to wrap it around myself because I knew
that the police were going to ask me certain questions.
They were going to ask 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

(19:23):
was able to kind 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

(19:44):
gloves on 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

(20:05):
me back 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

(20:26):
crawl 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

(20:47):
be my 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
point seven Kiss FM because he thought we were going
to have a party. But again, as I walked by him,

(21:09):
the light coming off of the stereo illuminated his profile,
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

(21:30):
my blanket tight and I ran.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
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 3 (21:50):
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

(22:13):
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
and please please let me in, the neighbors were home.
It happened to be a professor on campus who recognized me,

(22:34):
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 2 (22:46):
Wow, thank you for walking us through that. It's such
a heroine 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,

(23:09):
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

(23:30):
tell your story to law enforcement and how was that
for you.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
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.

(23:55):
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 puba care comings, the cheek swap, your vaginal swab

(24:16):
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

(24:36):
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 din 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

(25:01):
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 and 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

(25:21):
descriptions 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?

(25:41):
And so we realized that they had done an incomplete
rape kit. 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 what three or four hours since I almost died,

(26:04):
and now I'm being asked, you know, the questions like
how tall was he, how much did you 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

(26:26):
on me to help the police figure out who this
person was. And at the time, they used something called
an identicit, 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?

(26:46):
And I was like, no, it's more triangular. And then
you'd pick up the second part, 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, your ears, and everything that
makes up her face. So you go through these old tabs,
and when he was finished, he said to this, like
the man who raped you? And I said yes, And
so that composite sketch went in the newspaper and the

(27:08):
police station started receiving just a numerous phone calls, 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

(27:30):
days after my assault, I 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 to back, and I did. I took my time,

(27:50):
but I picked up photograph number three and initial to
back and they looked at me and they said, that's
who we thought it was. The photograph belonged to Ronald Cotton.
So you basically were showing six photographs right picked someone out,
and then got immedia encouragement from law enforcement. They said, well, yeah,
that's the guy we thought it was.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
When they said that's the guy we thought it was,
how did you feel in that moment.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
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 a huge
moment for me. And then about five or six days

(28:38):
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 room you see
in cop shows right where there's that one way glass

(29:00):
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 taken into this abandoned school room where
the only thing between me and the lineup was a
folding picnic table. So seven men are marched in front

(29:23):
of me holding numbers, and I was terrified because I thought, well,
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. It
was extremely traumatic. So as I looked through the seven

(29:45):
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 doubt
in the photograph, and that was a huge relief. That
would have been middle of August, so he would of

(30:08):
course be arrested, held over for what they call probable cause,
and we would await trial.

Speaker 1 (30:15):
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 3 (30:34):
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

(30:57):
identicit 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 before, his eyebrows are
not in that box, his lips are not in that box,

(31:17):
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

(31:41):
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,

(32:02):
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

(32:23):
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 2 (32:36):
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 3 (32:51):
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
recognized 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 brains work. It's not an intentional thing,

(33:15):
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 (33:34):
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

(33:57):
were getting.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
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 leading up to trial.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
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

(34:35):
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. The trial was in January nineteen eighty five.
It would last two weeks. I would testify for two

(34:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (35:09):
You know, you're having to repeat every graphic thing that
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

(35:29):
in your underwear? Didn't I know that that's how rapes happened?
You know, it was apparently important for the jury to
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 at
the same time. You know, I'm having to look at
the defendant. I'm looking at his family. I get up

(35:50):
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 after the two weeks of trial that came back
with guilty on all counts, and Ronald was sentenced to
life in fifty four years.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
And what did it feel like when you heard that sentence.

Speaker 3 (36:09):
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.

(36:33):
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

(36:54):
to be grieving. They just think that you're going to
be able to start your life again and on as
if you're not grieving the loss of what I had
and who I had been and what I wanted to
return to, Like that part of my life was just
completely over and I was left just in this space

(37:17):
alone to try to figure out what's next. And it
was really terrible.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
How are things with your family, did they go to
the trial, What was that support system like at the
time for you.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
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
can't really understand what I needed. Tomato super and girl

(37:56):
cheese sandwich wasn't going to cut it. And I also
think that people I 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 that you're okay. You're not dead, right, Jennifer. Nobody
shot you, so you're okay, right, Jennifer. I was young,

(38:18):
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, I can't deal with you.
It's just too much for me. And friends just don't

(38:39):
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 on to numb so that
I couldn't feel my skin. Of course, I had to

(39:01):
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 be a straight
A student and I made my first best, which meant
I wasn't going to graduate with a four point zero,
which was my goal, and I wasn't going to graduate
summa cum laude or a valedictorian, which was my goal.

(39:23):
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. So
I was missing work and I was missing class, and

(39:48):
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
and the summer of nineteen eighty seven, I received a
call from the investigator who had been in charge of
the original investigation, Mike Galden, and said that the Pellet

(40:10):
Court of North Carolina had overturned 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
an appeal, You just think that it's over. So I
didn't understand this appellate process. But the appellate courts had

(40:34):
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,
then that would have called into question my identification. Ronald
Cotton had been in Central Prison and Raleigh, North Carolina

(40:55):
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
named Bobby Poole. So in nineteen eighty seven, during the
second trial, they introduced this person, Bobby Pool, into the

(41:18):
trial and brought him in to court under Vordier. So
they dismissed the jury and asked Bobby Pool if he
had committed this crime, and of course he denied it.
They asked him if he had been bragging about committing
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

(41:40):
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,
Ronald would now be found guilty of both first ree rapes,
and this time Ronald would be sentenced re sentenced to

(42:00):
two life sentences and thirty years in prison, which meant
he would absolutely die in prison.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Did it feel final at that point to you?

Speaker 3 (42:09):
Yeah, 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.

Speaker 1 (42:31):
We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
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

(43:04):
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, trip,
let's keep you busy. So that's how I was busy.

(43:24):
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

(43:46):
to 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

(44:11):
talking about it. The only thing I had ever heard
about DNA other than through my science classes was OJ Simpson.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
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 3 (44:35):
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. I just can't.

(44:59):
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, like it 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,

(45:20):
and it went down. I forty headed to Raleigh, North Carolina,
to the State bure 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

(45:41):
first week of June and stood in my kitchen and
said that the DNA did not belong to Ronald Cotton,
that it did belong to Bobby Pool.

Speaker 2 (45:52):
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 (46:09):
I mean, how did you even take that information in?
What did you think?

Speaker 3 (46:15):
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

(46:38):
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

(47:00):
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

(47:22):
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
degree 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 eleven

(47:46):
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

(48:09):
the public heard for the next few years.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
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

(48:36):
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.

(48:57):
Bobby Pool, 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 (49:13):
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. Did you have any 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 3 (49:33):
I was told there would be media coverage. Again, 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

(49:53):
revealed the actual perpetrator. So it was an enormous story
across the country, and 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

(50:13):
at this point, nobody understood what was happening to crime
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

(50:34):
in many ways, to just erase myself from the world
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 2 (50:51):
Who found you?

Speaker 3 (50:53):
What had happened was There was a producer with Frontline
who wanted to do a document entry 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. You can find the girl. So

(51:13):
people started trying 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 Loterman, who was the producer, contacted me,

(51:36):
flew 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

(51:56):
to Ronald 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 like that. I lived it. So I agreed to
tell it under the understanding that Ronald stay in Burlington
and I was in Winston Salem, and that we weren't
going to meet. And he agreed, and so over the
next six months is he put together this documentary titled

(52:20):
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, and I remember watching

(52:41):
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 Poole should be there, But
why can't I see him in my brain? I can't.
So I called Mike Galden and I said, can you

(53:03):
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 of ninety seven, not
far from where I'd been raped thirteen years before. We

(53:23):
started to cry and talk about 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.

(53:43):
And what we realized at the end of those two
hours is that we had a lot 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 Poole had
done so much violence and it hurt so many women,

(54:05):
But he also sat back and knew that Ronald was
going to prison for what he had done to all
of us. And so that was where ron and I
were able to begin 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 2 (54:22):
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, like.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
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

(54:50):
very gentle and kind and funny and safe, Like I
immediately felt safe with him. It was a complete and
utter shift, and we immediately became friends. That day, we
parted in each other's arms, sharing each other's contact information,

(55:11):
and promising that we had lived this journey. We had
survived this thing together, and this was our story.

Speaker 2 (55:20):
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 3 (55:42):
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 of us could not return to the
former person that we were before both of us grieved,

(56:07):
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

(56:28):
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

(56:49):
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. 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 pulling back layers

(57:13):
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 harmed by it. Like,

(57:34):
it really got me thinking about our brains and how
trauma works and doesn't work, and how 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 help improve our system.

(57:55):
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 2 (58:07):
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 3 (58:17):
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

(58:39):
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 2 (58:58):
Over the following years, Jennifer 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 was

(59:21):
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 3 (59:32):
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

(59:53):
I'm just going to have to take this. I now
pushed 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

(01:00:14):
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 that's

(01:00:35):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:00:52):
Like?

Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
What would I say to my daughter? If this was
my daughter's story? Would I blame my daughter? No, you
wouldn't blame your daughter. I would hope you wouldn't blame
your daughter.

Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
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

(01:01:23):
for yourself at first it was, but then it 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 (01:01:37):
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. You know, 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

(01:01:59):
recollect of that is escaping me. Did you ever learn
anything about what gave her that level of conviction to
call and say that?

Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
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 (01:02:28):
Oh my god, that's mind blowing. It's actually worse than
anything I thought you were going to say.

Speaker 3 (01:02:33):
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

(01:02:54):
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 2 (01:03:11):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (01:03:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:03:13):
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

(01:03:36):
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 2 (01:03:48):
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 prison,
losing potentially years of their life for something they didn't do,
and exonerations become a celebration that justice has finally prevailed,

(01:04:10):
But the harm of wrongful convictions 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

(01:04:33):
had been caught, and then years later the case is
reopened and still unsolved.

Speaker 3 (01:04:40):
No crime victim and no crime survivor, no mortar 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 gone to prison.

(01:05:01):
We don't want get 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

(01:05:22):
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, which you
don't hear about is who the victims and survivors were.

(01:05:43):
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,

(01:06:05):
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,

(01:06:26):
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

(01:06:48):
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 statue of limitations have taken place, and the

(01:07:08):
guy who raped you, incidimized you lives an hour down
the road, but we can't prosecute him because you live
in a state that has statue 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.

(01:07:29):
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
ex honeries of course being blamed. We have a lot

(01:07:51):
of 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 innes some people should
go to preak. 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

(01:08:13):
to get better processes, 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.

(01:08:34):
Which would you choose. I would imagine close to one
hundred percent of people are going to say, oh, can
we do it like you know now? Yeah? 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

(01:08:55):
to do. Way, and I travel 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 refused 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,

(01:09:17):
don't tell me what to do. It's about closing the case.
And listen. There's a lot of people that will say, well, listen.

Speaker 2 (01:09:22):
The guy's a bad guy.

Speaker 3 (01:09:24):
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 2 (01:09:31):
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 not really being set up

(01:09:54):
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 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 3 (01:10:15):
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

(01:10:36):
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,

(01:10:56):
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 intellect
and gifts and creativity by just blanket putting people in prison.

(01:11:19):
And we've certainly not created a safer world to live in.

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
What is the mission of Healing justice? What going to work?
Do you do well?

Speaker 3 (01:11:27):
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 exoneries, and I kept hearing about these terrible stories
of the aftermath. Right like after the exoneration happens, everybody
thinks that the ex hoonery is going to get ten

(01:11:48):
million dollars or that 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

(01:12:09):
so we really do kind of two things. I mean,
our two 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

(01:12:30):
together to create connections 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

(01:12:53):
we don't feel like 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 2 (01:13:09):
I am so glad that Jennifer came on our podcast
and told us her story that was.

Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
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 exoneries with resources and community for healing. Yeah,
you can visit them at Healing Justiceproject dot org. And

(01:13:38):
they also hold these retreats in which crime victims and
exneries 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.
It's really powerful to watch.

Speaker 2 (01:13:55):
I think that one of the things that really stood
out to me in Jennifer's interview is talking about how
so 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 really felt like there

(01:14:15):
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 x
hogneries 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

(01:14:35):
able to speak with an axannaree 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,

(01:14:56):
and then I have to mention. So Jennifer and Ronald
Cotton co authored a book. 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

(01:15:17):
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 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

(01:15:39):
was in North Carolina Central Prison and he talks about
being mistaken for this other guy, 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,

(01:16:00):
and Ronald sees him and says that he looks like
the sketch, the original sketch 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,

(01:16:22):
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 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

(01:16:43):
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 to instant in
January of 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 and
sends it to his attorney, but he still spends, you know,

(01:17:05):
nine more years in prison before he's exonerated. And the
whole time he was like, I know it's this guy
Bobby Pool, and he was right.

Speaker 1 (01:17:12):
That is unimaginable.

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
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, right.

Speaker 1 (01:17:28):
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,

(01:17:52):
which is exactly how Ronald Cotton ended up in prison.

Speaker 2 (01:17:58):
That's a staggering percent. Sixty three percent involved eyewitness misidentification,
and yet from everything that we've learned, it makes sense.
So the lead detective Mike Goalden, who Jennifer spoke about
He actually went on to transform the way that North
Carolina approaches lineups and was really influential in instituting double

(01:18:22):
blind 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 (01:18:31):
Oh, it's like now it has to be in more
unbiased person being the middleman there.

Speaker 2 (01:18:36):
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 (01:18:44):
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

(01:19:05):
eyewitness identification. You know, Jennifer had this added pressure because
the other victim, who we now know to be Bobby Pool,
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 2 (01:19:27):
Yeah. Well, thanks for listening and we will be back
next week for an off record.

Speaker 1 (01:19:33):
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 a Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:19:43):
This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith.

Speaker 1 (01:19:48):
And me Paytia Eating. Our producers are Tom Bryfogel and
Alexis Samarosi.

Speaker 2 (01:19:52):
This episode was mixed by Tom Bryfogel. Our associate producer
is Christina Chamberlain. Our theme music is by Birds in
the Airport.

Speaker 1 (01:20:00):
Artwork by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 2 (01:20:01):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgareff, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.