Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton lived through a tragedy of injustice that drenched their lives in violence and hate. What emerged were stunning personal transformations and a powerful new partnership to try to protect the innocent.
By Tim Connor
The petite woman from Winston-Salem, North Carolina has told the story to audiences many times by now. When she walked into the foyer of the Gonzaga Law School Tuesday night, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino would be telling it for the fourth time in two days. The forensics of it, the intimately brutal details, have their own weight about them, like the sonic crush of a towering ocean wave against a cliff. But it’s always the part where she discusses Ronald Cotton, she says, that causes her voice to catch and her eyes to tear up. Every single time. And, she said, she knew it would happen again on this beautiful Tuesday evening, at the podium. It couldn’t be helped.
On the one hand, there are the mere facts of an innocent man losing eleven years of his life to prison because, surprisingly, even a smart, careful eyewitness like her
can be dead wrong.
The exoneration of Ronald Cotton is agony, upon agony, finally rescued by incredible persistence and serendipity. And what Thompson-Cannino and Cotton want people to know is how the system failed both of them, in the way that the search for the truth became corrupted, in part by racism and in larger part by procedures that are antiquated and flawed and which, they say, badly need to be changed.
So there is, from their perspectives, an urgent public policy message they’re trying to deliver. Still, what sucks the air out of the room when Jennifer tells the story is what Ronald Cotton told her that April day, twelve years ago, when the two of them actually met each other for the first time in a Baptist Church, after he’d been set free, and after a PBS documentary about the case had aired nationally.
“Ron came around the corner and I physically could not get up out of my chair. I was crying. I looked at him and I said, ‘Ronald, if I spent every second of every minute of every day of every week of every month for the rest of my life telling you how sorry I am for what happened to you, it wouldn’t come close to how my heart feels.’ Then Ronald did the one thing that I didn’t count on. He took my hands and he started to cry, and he said, ‘Jennifer, I forgave you years ago. I’m not angry with you. I want you to be happy. I want to be happy. I want you to live a good life and I want to live a good life. And don’t look over your shoulders thinking someone’s going to hurt you, because it will not be me.’”
“Often I hear people say that, well, Ronald’s out now, so this just proves the system works.’ It doesn’t prove the system works. Ronald Cotton got lucky. It was serendipity, it was lady luck. It wasn’t the system working.”
The story is told in their best-selling book, with co-author Erin Torneo, “Picking Cotton.” It begins twenty-five years ago when the beautiful life Jennifer imagined for herself and her fiance died in the still-dark hours of a July morning at the tip of a rapist’s knife.
“I started thinking, would he kill me so I wouldn’t recognize him later? Is this the last thing that I see before I expire? Will my mother have to come to the hospital in the morning and identify my body?”
She resolved those questions by not panicking and by cleverly negotiating her way into a position where she could escape from her small apartment in Burlington, North Carolina and run for help. At the same time, she had enough sense to resolve to get a good look at the attacker, even as he tried to avoid sources of light that would illuminate his features.
“I began to want to know the shape of his eyes. They were almond shaped. What was his nose like? It wasn’t particularly large. Did he have any identifying features that perhaps he couldn’t change later on, like a scar, or a missing tooth, or a piercing? What about his hair? Did he have facial hair? What about his ears? How about his voice? How about that disgusting mouth? I began to try to memorize everything about this man’s face. I was a good student. I was a 4.0 GPA student. I had a good memory. As he raped me, and began to talk to me, he made me so sick, that I vowed that when I survived this man was going to go to prison for the rest of his life.”
When Jennifer talks, she doesn’t avoid the word “hate.” On the receiving end was Ronald who, in their book together, offered this scene from his second trial for the rape of Jennifer and another Burlington woman who was assaulted the same evening, by the same man:
“If I so much glanced in the direction of Jennifer Thompson, I could feel her burn-in-hell glare,” he wrote.
“So I was carrying it for her [the other woman who'd been raped that night], and I was carrying it for you, and you, and you. And every woman who’d ever been violated and never able to identify her attacker. I was doing it for all women who’d been sexually violated. And I wanted him off the streets, forever.”
Jennifer didn’t just want Ronald to die in prison, she says, she even wanted him to be raped in prison so he could go to hell knowing what that was like. She incorporated this wish, she says, into her nightly prayers, even after she had found a new love in her life, married, become the mother of triplets, and moved to Winston-Salem.
There is a small constellation of heroes in the Thompson-Cannino/Cotton story and one of them is the state of North Carolina which, because of this powerful story and Jennifer and Ronald’s activism, is one of two states to enact major reforms in how it gathers eye witness and other crime scene evidence. Ironically, one of the heroes is Mike Gauldin, the lead detective on the case who, though working twice to convict Cotton, still nursed enough doubt about the case that he elected not to dispose of the rape kit evidence, which he was free to do, by law, after the conviction.
It was the DNA from a single, analyzable fragment of a sperm head in that evidence, Jennifer told her audience Tuesday, that proved Ronald Cotton was innocent.
It then came to Gauldin and an assistant district attorney to break that news to Jennifer in her kitchen, in June of 1995.
“My life had been turned upside down,” she said. “And so, if Ronald Cotton wasn’t the man who raped me, and that’s what I believed all these years, are Morgan, Blake and Brittany my children? Is God really God? I’d staked my life on it.”
Moreover, she knew the power of her eyewitness testimony had staked Ronald Cotton to his fate, eleven years of his twenties and thirties, to dangerous prisons in two states.
So, from disbelief, her mind quickly raced to terror: “I knew around every street corner, every dark alley, Ronald Cotton was going to be waiting for me. He was going to hurt me and he was going to hurt my children. I alerted the school, I alerted neighbors. I didn’t want anybody near my kids.”
Yet, the astonishing thread in the story is that this is not where Ronald Cotton was. Although he worked constantly to get help proving his innocence, he had already moved beyond anger such that when he was wrongly convicted a second time, he stood in the courtroom and sang about how God had come into his life.
“He took my hands and he started to cry, and he said, ‘Jennifer, I forgave you years ago. I’m not angry with you. I want you to be happy. I want to be happy. I want you to live a good life and I want to live a good life. And don’t look over your shoulders thinking someone’s going to hurt you, because it will not be me.’”
When a PBS Frontlines producer contacted her to be part of the documentary on the case, she first declined, she says, because she was ashamed. But then she decided that, without someone to speak for her, she had to speak for herself. A condition of her involvement, she says, is that she would not have to meet Ronald Cotton. The producers agreed and when the crew working on the documentary began sharing accounts with her about Ronald Cotton was “the nicest man,” she says she thought it was set-up and didn’t buy it.
But it was the aftermath of the Frontlines documentary, “What Jennifer Saw,” that pulled her toward her dramatic meeting with Ronald back in Burlington.
“Ronald Cotton and I were exactly the same age,” she writes, and yet she realized that he had none of the family memories of family holidays and birthdays over the past eleven years. “He looked forlorn on television, hurt and bewildered. The guilt suffocated me.”
In the the book she focused on Ronald’s last words in the documentary, that–”I would like to hear what she has to say–in her own words–to me.”
In her talk Tuesday, though, she said she was also drawn in by her own last words in the documentary, that though she now knew that Ronald Cotton was innocent, that it was still his face she saw in her nightmares.
“And then it hit me,” she said. “He shouldn’t be there. How do I change that, and how do I remove it?”
“In one case, a woman said I remember him because I saw the back of his head as he was running down the street. And he served 26 years in prison. I mean this is actually happening. It’s terrible. It’s not that all eyewitnesses are bad. It’s not that. It’s just that we need to understand how memory works. If we’re going to use it, we’ve got to understand it. And there needs to be a better way of collecting it, like any other piece of evidence.”–Jennifer Thompson-Cannino
The answer, simply, was their finally meeting in a church rather than a courtroom.
After sitting and talking with him for two hours, she says, she came to realize “that anger and joy, love and peace, cannot reside in the same human heart. They just can’t co-exist. Ronald Cotton became my teacher that night. Forgiveness. Kindness. Mercy. Love. The man I had prayed for eleven years to die became my teacher, my leader. He showed me how to do this.”
One unexpected treasure of “Picking Cotton” are what the two share of their friendship, including Jennifer’s appreciation for just how funny Ronald Cotton can be. It’s hard to resist and the only thing disorienting about it is that you don’t ever expect to find such grace amidst such a tragedy.
The story, of course, doesn’t end there and the evening at Gonzaga is less of an epilogue and a book tour and much more a call to action. The first thing Jennifer shared in her talk Tuesday was the phone call she received in June 2000 from the Houston lawyer representing Gary Graham, a man who would soon be executed by Texas and Governor George W. Bush.
She admitted than even after her experience in her own case she said to the calling lawyer:
“I just need to tell you, I’m an advocate of the death penalty system because, by golly, in the United States of America, we do not execute innocent people. And that’s why we have the clause in our court systems, ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ And so if you’re sentenced to death, there can be no doubt and therefore I’m confident that the system works. But I will come down and tell my story.’”
“And that’s what I did,” she continued. “I traveled to Houston, Texas, with Gary Graham’s case file in my hand and began to read it and I was shocked. I was shocked that this man was going to be executed in 22 days based on the eyewitness testimony of a single witness at ten o’clock at night through a rear view mirror having had a two or three second glimpse of the shooter.”
You can tell that Thompson-Cannino is haunted by the Graham case, but she’s hardly alone in that. The morning after Graham was executed, the New York Times published an editorial, “Irreversible Error in Texas,” that excoriated both then-Texas Governor and Presidential candidate George W. Bush and then-Vice-President and Democratic Presidential candidate Al Gore for doing nothing to stop it.
“The foundation principles of a society in which citizens submit to the rule of law are that the guilty will be subject to proportional punishment and that the innocent will be vindicated through a fair and rigorous legal process,” the Times said. As for Graham’s case: “There is powerful evidence that he did not commit the murder for which the state put him to death. Mr. Graham, represented at trial by a court-appointed lawyer who failed to mount a meaningful defense, was convicted largely on the evidence of a single witness who said she saw him from 30 to 40 feet away through her car windshield. There was no physical evidence linking Mr. Graham to the crime. Tests showed that the gun he was carrying was not the murder weapon, and two other witnesses who were never called to testify at trial said they had seen the killer, and it was not Mr. Graham.”
She is also deeply troubled about how racial issues seem to have compromised the process in the Cotton case, and the way in which race shows up across the board in documented cases of false convictions, with more than 8 out of 10 cases involving wrongly convicted African Americans.
In the Cotton she says, she didn’t learn until 2001 about the role of a detective who, she says, “wanted him [Cotton] to go down because he had dated white women.” That she says, “makes me sick.” She subsequently learned that a key informant who told investigators that she saw Cotton on a bicycle in the early morning hours in Burlington near the crime scenes had charges pending against her and her son, and was a friend of the detective who held the racial grudge against Cotton.
Part of her presentation is to walk through the process by which she says her memory became “contaminated.” First, she was asked to help a sketch artist put together a composite image of the attacker’s face. Second, after the sketch had appeared in the newspaper, resulting in Cotton’s being taken into custody, she was shown a photo lineup, in which six photographs were put in front of her, and she picked one. The next step involved an actual line up of seven black men, in person, out of which she picked Cotton.
With both the photo selection and the lineup, she was certain her selection, Cotton, was the rapist.
“The community must insist on this. You all elect your officials, you elect your D.A., you elect your legislators, your senators, you elect these people. It’s up to you to say we’ve got to have the system put in place. If we can do a better job, let’s do a better job. If we know there are best practices to put in place, let’s put the best practices in place.”–Jennifer Thompson-Cannino
In looking back on it, she can break it down into the subtle but critical turns in which her own eagerness to “pass the test,” as she put it, essentially encoded a new memory of what her attacker looked like.
“And you draw from the latest thing you see,” she explained. “That’s how memory really works. By the time I went to trial in January 1996, Ronald Cotton had become the rapist, and there was no way that was going to be removed out of my mind, to the point, where, in 1987, when Bobby Poole is right there in front of me, I didn’t recognize him.”
Bobby Poole was the real rapist, and he would later confess after being confronted with the results of the DNA tests. The instance where Jennifer, as part of Ronald’s second trial, picked Ronald Cotton as the rapist when he was standing next to Poole in the court room is one of the most stunning scenes in their saga.
Remarkably, Cotton had kept a copy of the composite sketch Jennifer helped create beneath his bunk, and when Poole, by sheer happenstance, was imprisoned for another crime and placed in his prison dormitory, Cotton realized that he was the man who committed the rapes in Burlington for which Cotton was convicted.
“Seventy five percent of our exonerations have gotten fallible, ‘infallible’ eye 
witness identification,” she said Tuesday. “It’s just wrong. Seventy-five percent.”
And that gets to the reforms that she and her amazing and good friend Ronald Cotton campaign for today. (Cotton couldn’t make it to Spokane because he had to return from Monday appearances in Seattle and Tacoma to get back to his job in North Carolina.)
The Cotton and Thompson-Cannino appearances in Washington were due largely to Theresa Connor of the Integrity of Justice Project out of Olympia. The Center for Justice is the fiscal sponsor and one of many stakeholders in the project. The purpose of the effort is to foster a partnership with law enforcement, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges to work to identify best practices and procedures to ensure that the innocent don’t get falsely convicted, and that those who do get convicted do so on the basis of the soundest evidence available.
“The reason we support the Integrity of Justice program,” says CFJ’s Breean Beggs, “is that it’s a collaborative effort that strikes at the root of wrongful convictions and makes our community and our state a better place. The exciting thing about this program is we’re trying to do what would normally take about twenty years in Washington, and trying to do it in three.”
Beggs is one of 17 advisers to the new project.
“What Jennifer’s story demonstrated,” Beggs said, “is that even when a witness is absolutely sure of who the perpetrator is, if her memory is polluted by manipulative police practices, whether intentional or unintentional, it can put an innocent man in prison for a decade. And it’s really the procedures that police use in collecting the eyewitness identifications that need to be changed to keep that from happening.”
The reforms Thompson-Cannino advocated have been voluntarily adopted by law enforcement officials and judicial officers across the country. They include:
1) Changing photo identification to so-called double blind, sequential procedures in which neither the victim/witness has prior knowledge of who the suspect is, and whether the suspect is included in the pictures being shown. Moreover, unlike in Jennifer’s case, the photos would be shown in sequence, rather than all at once, to avoid the tendency of people to select the photo in the group that looks most like the person they witnessed.
2) Videotaping all interrogations, confessions and witness identifications, so that juries can see how sure, or unsure, and how voluntary or involuntary statements by witnesses or suspects are.
3) Best practices in retrieving and restoring DNA evidence, and providing a right to defendants to access DNA evidence where it exists.
Beggs says he is looking forward to the conversation amongst the project’s stakeholders on how to adopt similar best practices in Washington.
–CFJ
