Ronald Cotton:
Jennifer Thompson was the perfect student, perfect daughter, perfect homecoming queen. And
when her perfect world was ripped apart, the petite blonde with the dark expressive eyes became
something she could never have imagined.
The perfect witness.
Police had never seen a victim so composed, so determined, so sure.
Just hours after her ordeal, after a jaded doctor swabbed her for semen samples in a hospital, she
sat in a Burlington police station with Detective Mike Gauldin, combing through photos, working
up a composite.
She picked out his eyebrows, his nose, his pencil-thin mustache.
She picked out his photo.
A week later, she sat across a table from six men holding numbered cards. She picked No. 5.
"That's my rapist," she told Gauldin.
In court, she put her right hand on the Bible and swore to tell the truth. Then she looked directly
into the expressionless face of the suspect.
"He is the man who raped me," she said.
She had never been so sure of anything.
His name was Ronald Cotton, and he was the same age as she. Local man, headed down the
wrong road, had already been in trouble with the law. Served 18 months in prison for attempted
sexual assault.
She was white. He was black. Police knew he liked white women.
When Thompson picked him out of the lineup, everyone was sure they had the right man.
Everyone, that is, except Ronald Cotton.
Cotton is tall and handsome, with baby-smooth skin and a warm, engaging smile. Confronted by
Thompson, his normal calm failed him. He was petrified.
"Why me?" he agonized silently as she told her story in court. "Why are you so sure it was me?"
But he said nothing, betrayed no emotion.
Cotton's actions and past hadn't helped his case. He was nervous. He got his dates mixed up. His
alibis didn't check out. A piece of foam was missing from his shoe, similar to a piece found at the
crime scene.
But it wasn't circumstantial evidence that brought Ronald Cotton down. It was Jennifer Thompson.
The knock on the door of her Winston-Salem home came out of the blue. The detective hadn't just
dropped by casually to say hello. It had been 11 years. Standing in Thompson's kitchen, Gauldin
struggled to break the news.
"Jennifer," he said. "You were wrong. Ronald Cotton didn't rape you. It was Bobby Poole."
"You were wrong." There was new evidence, Gauldin was saying. DNA tests. New scientific proof
that hadn't been available before.
There must be some mistake.
How could she have been wrong? She was still so very sure.
Gauldin tried to comfort her, pointing out that others had also been at fault, including two juries,
two judges, detectives, himself. The whole system failed when it condemned Ronald Cotton,
Gauldin said, but it was about to be set right.
Only an extraordinary sequence of events had made that possible: Cotton's persistence in
proclaiming his innocence, a law professor's curiosity, the fact that sophisticated DNA tests, which
hadn't been available 11 years ago, could now be used.
The law professor, Richard Rosen of the University of North Carolina, had taken on the case,
troubled that a man had been sentenced to life based almost exclusively on eyewitness testimony.
"In so many cases, eyewitnesses can be unreliable," Rosen said. "At that point, I had no idea how
strong and compelling Thompson was. I'm not sure any jury in the world would have acquitted
him in the face of her testimony."
Rosen's probing led to DNA samples from Cotton and Poole. The police, by some fluke, had saved
sheets and other evidence from the rape scenes. Generally such evidence is destroyed after a
case is decided.
In the end, Gauldin told Thompson, the system worked. An innocent man would be freed.
Ronald Cotton, Gauldin said, is a very lucky man.
But Gauldin had no answer when Thompson turned to him, face wracked with anguish.
"How do I give someone back 11 years?" she cried.
Haunted by mistake
Jennifer Thompson never stops. Never stops washing and ironing and baking, never stops driving
her children to soccer and Scouts and piano, never stops filling her home with love.
For two years after Gauldin's visit, she never stopped feeling ashamed.
It was still Cotton's face that haunted her, even though science had proved that it was Poole who
raped her. Over and over, she wondered: How could she have made such a terrible mistake?
Mark Hansen, Forensic Science: Scoping out eyewitness Ids, 87 A.B.A.J.
39, April, 2001.
Nobody understands better than Jennifer Thompson how unreliable eyewitness evidence can be. Except maybe
for Ronald Cotton.
Thompson is a North Carolina rape victim whose eyewitness identification of a suspect put the wrong man in
prison for life. Twice.
Cotton is the innocent man who spent 11 years of his life in prison because of Thompson's mistake. And he
might still be behind bars today if he hadn't been watching the O.J. Simpson trial on television in prison in 1995 and
heard about a test for DNA.
Thompson, now the 38-year-old mother of triplets, was a 22-year-old college student in 1984 when someone
broke into her apartment, put a knife to her throat and raped her.
Several days later, she went to the police station and picked Cotton's photo out of a lineup. She also picked him
out of a physical lineup and identified him as her assailant at his 1985 trial.
"I was absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt certain he was the man who raped me when I got on that witness
stand and testified against him," Thompson recalls now. "And nobody was going to tell me any different."
Two years later, though, Cotton won a new trial where there was testimony about another man, a fellow inmate
who had reportedly told other prisoners he had committed the rape for which Cotton had been convicted.
But the man denied it on the witness stand. And Thompson testified that she had never seen the other man
before in her life.
Nine years later, Cotton was watching the Simpson trial unfold on TV when he heard about a miraculous new
test that could prove his innocence. So he asked to be tested.
And when the results came back, Thompson got the shock of her life. Cotton was innocent. It was his fellow
inmate, the man she swore she had never seen before, who had raped her.
"I felt like my whole world had been turned upside down, like I had betrayed everybody, including myself,"
Thompson says.
But experts say they aren't surprised by her story. Mistaken eyewitness identification is the No. 1 cause of
wrongful convictions, they say.
Cotton isn't angry. In fact, he and Thompson have since become friends. "You can't forget, but you can
forgive," he says.
But he also counts his blessings every day. And thanks God for DNA. "If it weren't for that, I wouldn't be where
I am today," he says.