The Wrongful Conviction

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Speaker 10 I remember thinking about what it would feel like to die, and I remember wondering how much it will hurt.

Speaker 1 Welcome to The Knife. I'm Hannah Smith.

Speaker 9 I'm Patia Eaton. 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 1 Jennifer's life changed forever when, at 22 years old, she became the victim of a violent crime.

Speaker 1 But a decade later, what happened to Jennifer would make headlines for a reason so unexpected, it changed the course of her life forever.

Speaker 1 Now, over 30 years later, she joins us to reflect on what happened and how everything went so wrong.

Speaker 9 Our conversation with Jennifer took place on February 21st, 2025. Let's get into the interview.

Speaker 1 Hi, Jennifer. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Speaker 10 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 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 10 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.

Speaker 10 I'm the founder of Healing Justice Project, which is a national organization dedicated to helping all of those who have been impacted by wrongful convictions kind of navigate the healing space.

Speaker 10 Born and raised in North Carolina, and I was born in 1962, so I grew up in really the segregated South.

Speaker 10 Half of our town was, you know, wealthy and white, and the other half of the town, literally across the train tracks, were poor and black. Winston-Salem is a town where R.J.

Speaker 10 Reynolds Tobacco Company was founded, Haynes Hosery was founded. So it's like enormous wealth, but also enormous poverty.
And that was where I was raised. It's where I was born.
It's how I grew up.

Speaker 10 I often tell people that you don't really notice things that are wrong until you're removed from it. So the waters that I was swimming in as a child were segregation.

Speaker 10 I grew up in a white, relatively privileged home.

Speaker 10 So many of us, particularly people that are white, we grow up and we're given certain things almost as a birthright, 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, you know, it's balanced.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 That if you ended up in an orange jumpsuit behind a defense table, you were absolutely guilty of a crime. You were a criminal.
You deserved whatever punishment the system meted out to you.

Speaker 10 And if you sat at the prosecutor's side of the table, you were a victim and it was clear and it was

Speaker 10 clean. Within my family structure, I knew from a very young age that I didn't belong.

Speaker 10 I ended up at Elon College in 1983. 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.

Speaker 10 And in my my family's eyes, that was important, right? Women were to marry a respectable man. And he checked all the boxes.
And so in 1983, I was in a really great place in my life.

Speaker 10 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 1984, July 28th was a very hot day.

Speaker 10 I mean, July in the South, the humidity is unfathomable. So my boyfriend and I, our plan was to go play tennis.
And I was a tennis player. I played on the tennis team in high school.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And the rest of the day was kind of, you know, a typical 22-year-old college student day.

Speaker 10 He took me back home later that afternoon to my apartment and he was going to go home and take a shower and then we were going to meet up for dinner and then go to a summer party at one of his friends' houses.

Speaker 10 So he picked me up probably around six o'clock and took me to a Chinese food buffet because I had a very high metabolism in those days and I ate just really unbelievable amounts of food at any given sitting.

Speaker 10 And so nobody in their right mind would have ever taken me to an a la carte restaurant.

Speaker 10 He always took me to a buffet because it was, you know, for $2.99 or $3.99, I could eat as much as I wanted to eat, which I did.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And I came down with a massive headache, just massive.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 He took me back to my apartment probably around eight o'clock, gave me some water, brought me some aspirin.

Speaker 10 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, you know, violently sick. And that was my last memory of him that night.

Speaker 10 The police reports the following day would show that he left sometime between 9 and 9.30 p.m.

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 10 and none of these apartments had central air. They all had those window boxes for air conditioning.
The window unit in my bedroom was at my headboard.

Speaker 10 So when it would come on at night, like you could not hear anything. Therefore, I did not hear him leave.

Speaker 10 But I also didn't hear police sirens that were all throughout my apartment complex at midnight.

Speaker 10 They were searching for a man who had attempted to break into my neighbor's apartment across the parking lot.

Speaker 10 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 called the police.

Speaker 10 He heard her call the police and she told the police officers that he had on a white knit glove and a dark blue shirt with three white stripes on his biceps.

Speaker 10 But he took off running before they could get him.

Speaker 10 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 in my bedroom.

Speaker 10 Now I lived alone, so hearing movement in your bedroom. is alarming.

Speaker 10 But, you know, when you're in that space of awake, but but not really awake, you think you might have heard something, but you're not positive you heard it.

Speaker 10 Do you go back to sleep or do you wake up and try to identify a noise, right? Which is really frightening, particularly for women that are living alone.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And my first thought and my first impulse was to believe this was probably my boyfriend, that he had fallen asleep on my floor. He was trying not to wake me as he was leaving to go home.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 He never did because his mother lived about a mile and a half, two miles from where my apartment was. And she was very, very intentional about where he was at all times.

Speaker 10 So I knew that it wasn't my boyfriend. And that's when I said, who is that? Who's there?

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Speaker 4 We come to this legal system for justice.

Speaker 11 But we don't always get it. I'm Melissa Malbranch.

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Speaker 19 After taking several months of hiatus, we are back with new episodes, a new logo, a new approach, and yes, even a new name.

Speaker 19 After nine seasons with my esteemed co-hosts, shout out to Fonticolo, Laia, Sugar Steve, and Unpaid Bill, I'm now flying solo as the Questlove show.

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Speaker 19 Listen to the Questlove Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 10 Very quickly, a man jumped up up on my bed.

Speaker 10 I screamed and he straddled my body with his legs and put a knife to my left side of my throat and covered my mouth with a glove and told me to shut up or he would kill me.

Speaker 1 So terrifying.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it is terrifying.

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 10 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, you actually don't know what you would do.

Speaker 10 The same applies for the ability to kind of make an eyewitness identification.

Speaker 10 Everybody thinks that, you know, well, I know what I saw, but you don't know what you would do if you're wondering if you're going to be murdered.

Speaker 10 It's about 20 minutes total throughout the whole entire event.

Speaker 1 What was going through your mind? Was it just, I got to survive this?

Speaker 10 You know, there's a couple of things that went through my mind. I mean, the initial thing, obviously, that went through my mind was I'm in a lot of danger.
It's 1984. There's no cell phones.

Speaker 10 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 probably done this before.
before.

Speaker 10 So for me, the first thing that went through my mind was do not physically fight because you're going to die.

Speaker 10 And I remember thinking about what it would feel like to die.

Speaker 10 And I remember wondering 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?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 Those are the things initially that went through my body. But then I hate bullies and I've never backed down from a bully.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And so that's when I began to to like really calculate and think.

Speaker 10 And so I remember thinking to myself, like, Jennifer, you're smart. You've not been drinking.
You've, you've not been using drugs. You know, you're a straight A student.
You've got a good memory.

Speaker 10 So for me, staying alive was equated to pay attention to this person, figure out what he looks like, listen to everything he says, try to pick up on a lisp or some type of a speech that, you know, is just different.

Speaker 10 I remember thinking, look for things he can't change later. Look for scars, tattoos, or, you know, missing teeth or something that he couldn't change later on.

Speaker 10 And those were the things that initially I started paying 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.

Speaker 10 and choke on it because I was on my back.

Speaker 10 So I turned my head and that would actually end up saving my life that night when he said, relax, I'm not going to hurt you. And I don't know why I said it, but I said, I can't.
I'm afraid of knives.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And for whatever reason, the power dynamics just shifted right there. So I was able to get him off of me.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 They were going to ask me how tall he was and how much did he weigh.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And so I 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.

Speaker 10 He had on dark blue canvas shoes that that slipped on your feet. There were no shoelaces.
He had on khaki colored army fatigue pants.

Speaker 10 He had on a dark blue shirt with three white stripes on the biceps and he had white gloves on his hands. He was African-American.
He was in his early 20s. He had short, close-cropped hair.

Speaker 10 He had a pencil-thin mustache. Like every single thing that I could remember that night meant I was going to live.

Speaker 10 And over the next like few minutes, he pretended to drop the knife out of the front door.

Speaker 10 He came back in and grabbed me and and tried to pull 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 plan 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 you know 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 would probably break my legs.

Speaker 10 And then I remembered him saying he had come through the back door where the kitchen was. And I needed to get to that back door because his way in was going to be my way out.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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 98.7 Kiss FM because he thought we were going to have a party.

Speaker 10 But again, as I walked by him, 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.

Speaker 10 And so I started making noise with water running and ice cubes hitting the sink and cabinet doors shutting. as I started opening up the back door.
And I just pulled my blanket tight and I ran.

Speaker 1 On July 28th, 1984, a strange man broke into Jennifer's home while she was asleep. He attacked and raped her.

Speaker 1 Jennifer managed to escape, running out of the back door of her home with a blanket wrapped around her.

Speaker 10 It's about 3.30 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 So I did the 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.

Speaker 10 I didn't know who lived there, but as I was banging on the back door, screaming that I'd been raped and please, please let me in.

Speaker 10 The neighbors were home. It happened to be a professor on campus who recognized me and she told her husband to let me in.
And they did. And I fainted and they called the police.

Speaker 10 And the next thing I knew, you know, I was being taken to the hospital for a rape kit.

Speaker 1 Wow. Thank you for walking us through that.
It's such a harrowing story that you lived through. And it strikes me just how you were taking meticulous mental notes about everything.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Obviously, this is the beginning of a huge years-long situation for you that will involve law enforcement, the legal system.

Speaker 1 There's so many people that experience sexual assault 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.

Speaker 1 Can you talk just a little bit about that first experience of having to tell your story to law enforcement and how was that for you?

Speaker 10 It's really complicated and it's incredibly traumatic. I mean, you've just survived this trauma.

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 10 It's like my body was the crime scene, and that's where the evidence is.

Speaker 10 And depending on where you go, depends on how you're going to be treated as an assault survivor. This is 1984.

Speaker 10 There were no such things as sane nurses.

Speaker 10 And so the doctor who came in to collect the identification, the pubic hair combings, the cheek swab, your vaginal swab, 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.

Speaker 10 And so he haphazardly did that.

Speaker 10 But that would also be the location where I knew and realized that the person who had raped me had gone on within less than an hour and raped another woman less than a mile from my home.

Speaker 10 And when he had crawled through her den window when she was sleeping and bit her and slapped her and punched her and then raped her because I could hear her down the hall crying.

Speaker 10 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 hatred was palatable.

Speaker 10 I could like 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.

Speaker 10 And so from there, I was taken to the police station and began to give descriptions of what this person looked like.

Speaker 10 And as I was giving 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.

Speaker 10 Did they give you the morning after pill? And I said, no.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 You just can't imagine like the amount of trauma my body is now storing. And so after the second rape kit, again, I go back to the police station.

Speaker 10 It's now been what, three or four hours since I almost died. And now I'm being asked, you know, the questions like, how tall was he? How much did he weigh? What was his hair?

Speaker 10 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 clear description.

Speaker 10 So I felt like a lot of weight and pressure on me to help the police figure out who this person was.

Speaker 10 And at the time, they used something called an identicate, which was just a a big plastic file box that had tabs of every part of your face.

Speaker 10 And so the police would pick up a drawing of the shape of a person's face. And is it this face? And I was like, no, it's more triangular.
And then you'd pick up the second part.

Speaker 10 Is it more like this face? And same for your eyebrows and your eyes and your eyelashes and your lips and your nose and your chin and your cheeks and your ears and everything that makes up her face.

Speaker 10 So you go through these little tabs. And when he was finished, he said, is this like the man who raped you?

Speaker 10 And I said yes and so that composite sketch went in the newspaper and um the police station started receiving just 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 3 a.m on july 29th same exact time that I had been raped.

Speaker 10 So three days after my assault, I was called into the police station to do do a photographic lineup.

Speaker 10 And they would show me what they refer to as a six-pack, which is three photos on top, three photos in the bottom, and ask me to take my time.

Speaker 10 I don't feel compelled, but if you see him pick up the photograph and initial the back, and I did, I took my time, but I picked up photograph number three and initialed the back.

Speaker 10 And they looked at me and they said, that's who we thought it was.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 10 The photograph belonged to Ronald Cotton.

Speaker 1 So you basically were shown six photographs. Right.

Speaker 1 Picked someone out and then got immediate encouragement from law enforcement. They said, well, yeah, that's the guy we thought it was.

Speaker 9 When they said that's the guy we thought it was, how did you feel in that moment?

Speaker 10 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. It's called confirmation.
I felt like I had done it right.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And then about five or six days after the photographic lineup, I was called again to come back to the police station. They wanted me to do a physical lineup.

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 10 Where there's that one-way glass and there's the lineup, but your identity is protected.

Speaker 10 That room was being renovated in the police department.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 So seven men are marched in front 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?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 So as I looked through the seven men in the lineup, honestly, I narrowed it down to number four and five.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And again, the police officers looked at me and said, great job. That's who you picked out in the photograph.
And that was a huge relief.

Speaker 10 relief that would have been you know middle of august so he would of course be arrested held over for what they call probable cause and we would await trial

Speaker 9 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 Great question.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 So as I'm doing that identicate, And I'm looking through the different eyelashes and the eyebrows and the lips and the noses, my memory at that moment starts becoming contaminated.

Speaker 10 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.
His cheeks and chin, that's not in that box.

Speaker 10 You have 75 eyebrows to choose from. There's millions of eyebrows in the world, right?

Speaker 10 And human beings are not capable of compartmentalizing the human face. So we look at your face in totality.
I mean, unless you have some very strange eyebrow, right? You really can't memorize that.

Speaker 10 And 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.

Speaker 10 And what is now in place of it is a composite sketch image. So that when I go to the photographic lineup, what I'm actually looking to match up, and it's all completely subconscious.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 Therefore, Ronald Cotton's photograph, which was three years old in that lineup, was the closest photograph to the composite sketch. Our brains are malleable and we are so prone to suggestion.

Speaker 10 And so things can go into our memory that wasn't there before, but now it's a permanent fixture in our brain.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Is your mind now using those as references?

Speaker 10 It is. It's scanning all of that, right? You're scanning your memory brain.
What my memory was saying was, oh my God, that number five looks like I recognize him. Like I'll never forget that face.

Speaker 10 And of course, I recognize him. I had picked his photograph out of a lineup the week before, but you don't know that.
It's just the way our brains work.

Speaker 10 It's not an intentional thing, 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.

Speaker 10 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 9 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 3 a.m.?

Speaker 9 Was that also playing a role in this confirmation you were getting?

Speaker 10 Yes, I was told about the phone call. I was told that Ronald had just been released that spring out of prison after doing 18 months for attempted sexual assault.

Speaker 10 I was told pretty much everything leading up to trial.

Speaker 1 Each time Jennifer picked Ronald Cotton out of a lineup, she received confirmation from law enforcement that she'd chosen their suspect.

Speaker 1 Additionally, Ronald Cotton was the only person who appeared in both the photo and in-person lineups.

Speaker 1 There was also the woman who called and reported seeing Ronald Cotton outside of Jennifer's apartment the night of the attack, wearing the same clothes, the white gloves that Jennifer remembered her attacker wearing.

Speaker 1 Jennifer felt confident that Ronald Cotton was the man who raped her.

Speaker 10 The trial was in January of 1985. It would last two weeks.
I would testify for two and a half days. Again, you know, when you think about the process and what was happening, it's all trauma.

Speaker 10 My body was just registering trauma after trauma. Testifying was horrible.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 It's just what defense attorneys do. I was told, what did I think would happen when you're a single woman living alone and you go to bed in your underwear? Didn't I know that that's how rapes happen?

Speaker 10 You know, it was apparently 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.

Speaker 10 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 to go to the bathroom and his sister's in the bathroom.

Speaker 10 It's really frightening. You don't know what's going to happen.
So after the two weeks of trial, the jury came back with guilty on all counts and Ronald was sentenced to life in 54 years.

Speaker 1 And what did it feel like when you heard that sentence?

Speaker 10 You know, there's a huge relief. You feel like the system works, like you feel validated, right? This is a system I've been told my whole life works.

Speaker 10 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 is closure.

Speaker 10 You get to move on.

Speaker 10 You can put this behind you, move forward.

Speaker 10 It 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 casserole.

Speaker 10 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 to be grieving.

Speaker 10 They just think that you're going to be able to start your life again and carry on as if you're not grieving the loss of what what I had and who I had been and what I wanted to return to.

Speaker 10 Like that part of my life was just completely over

Speaker 10 and I was left just in this space alone to try to figure out what's next. And it was really terrible.

Speaker 1 How were things with your family? Did they go to the trial? What was that support system like at the time for you?

Speaker 10 The truth is

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 10 what I needed

Speaker 10 tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich wasn't going to cut it And I also think that people still don't understand the violent nature of sexual assault and what that does to the survivor and to the victims of rape.

Speaker 10 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.
I was 22 years old.

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And friends just don't come over because you cry a lot and all the time. So you're really left in this grief because that's what it is.
It's grief. You're left in that grief alone.

Speaker 10 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 move apartments and I had to do that alone.

Speaker 10 I did graduate, but for the first time, I made a B.

Speaker 10 That sounds, you know, crazy, but I wanted to be a straight A student and I made my first B, which meant I wasn't going to graduate with a 4.0, which was my goal.

Speaker 10 And I wasn't going to graduate summa cum laude or a valedictorian, which was my goal. But I graduated and I didn't go back to school because I just, I couldn't.

Speaker 10 I couldn't go to bed at night because I was so afraid.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 So I was missing work and I was missing class and I was a disaster. So I moved.
I just left North Carolina and I met another person. I fell in love with him.

Speaker 10 I came back a year later, back to North Carolina, got a job in a bank.

Speaker 10 And the summer of 1987, I received a call from the investigator who had been in charge of the original investigation, Mike Galdon, and said that the appellate court of North Carolina had overturned the decision and that we would have to go back for a second trial.

Speaker 10 And I didn't understand any of this because nobody tells you this as a victim, right?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 So I didn't understand this appellate process, but the appellate courts had said that the jury should have known about the second victim because the first trial was only me.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 Ronald Cotton had been in central prison in Raleigh, North Carolina since 1985 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.

Speaker 10 So in 1987, during the second trial, they introduced this person, Bobby Poole, into the trial and brought him in to court under Voardier.

Speaker 10 So they dismissed the jury and asked Bobby Poole if he had committed this crime. And of course, he denied it.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And both of us said, no, we did not recognize him. And did we recognize anyone in the courtroom that had committed the crimes? Both of us pointed out Ronald Cotton.

Speaker 10 And so in the second trial, Ronald would now be found guilty of both first-degree rapes.

Speaker 10 And this time, Ronald would be sentenced, re-sentenced to two life sentences and 30 years in prison, which meant he would absolutely die in prison.

Speaker 1 Did it feel final at that point to you?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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 We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

Speaker 4 We come to this legal system for justice.

Speaker 11 But we don't always get it. I'm Melissa Malbranch.

Speaker 12 And I'm Michael Foote.

Speaker 4 You might know me as everyone's favorite lawyer from TikTok.

Speaker 13 I'm sick of this whole like my life is separate from my job.

Speaker 12 It ain't. I'm a fear Steve in the courtroom as well as at home.

Speaker 14 Every week on our podcast brief recess, we take the legal world out of the courtroom and into real life.

Speaker 11 Like, can your boss actually fire you for what you post online?

Speaker 13 What happens if ICE knocks on your door?

Speaker 15 Or what should you do if you get arrested at a protest?

Speaker 4 We break down insane headlines, answer real questions from listeners, and share wild stories about what really happens in court.

Speaker 16 Friends, please remember while Michael is a lawyer, he is not your lawyer.

Speaker 12 Unless you want to hire me.

Speaker 14 I mean, that's a different thing.

Speaker 4 I am, everyone has a price, and I'm actually pretty cheap.

Speaker 14 From the Exactly Right Network, new episodes of Brief Recess drop every Thursday. Watch Brief Recess on YouTube.

Speaker 4 Listen to Brief Recess on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 19 All right, good people, what's up? It's Quest Love, and I'm really excited to announce that my podcast is back. Finally, yes, you heard that right.

Speaker 19 After taking several months of hiatus, we are back with new episodes, a new logo, a new approach, and yes, even a new name.

Speaker 19 After nine seasons with my esteemed co-hosts, Shao to Fonticolo, Laia, Sugar Steve, and Unpaid Bill, I'm now flying solo as the Quest Love Show.

Speaker 19 New conversations are on the way with some incredible guests like journalist turn filmmaker Cameron Crowe.

Speaker 20 It's like the Barry Gordy thing.

Speaker 20 You know, if you send me a letter and it's B-A-R-R-Y, you didn't take the time to know how my name was spelled, and I can't take the time to know what you want from me.

Speaker 2 Goodbye.

Speaker 20 You know, I love that.

Speaker 19 Listen to the Questlove Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 17 Hello, America's sweetheart Johnny Knoxville here. I want to tell you about my new true crime podcast, Crimeless, Hillbilly Heist, from Smartless Media, Campside Media, and Big Money Players.

Speaker 17 It's a wild tale about a gang of high-functioning nitwits who somehow pulled off America's third largest cash heist.

Speaker 18 Kind of like Robin Hood, except for the part where he steals from the rich and gives to the poor.

Speaker 18 I'm not that generous.

Speaker 17 It's a damn near inspiring true story for anyone out there who's ever shot for the moon, then just totally muffed up the landing.

Speaker 6 They stole $17 million and had not bought a ticket to help him escape.

Speaker 5 So we're sitting like, oh God, what do we do?

Speaker 18 What do we do?

Speaker 12 That was dumb.

Speaker 4 People do not follow my example.

Speaker 17 Listen to Crimeless, Kill Billy Heist, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 10 I got married. I got pregnant.
I had triplets in the spring of 1990. And honestly, the triplets were my reason to not die every single day.
And it gave me a task. It gave me a job.

Speaker 10 It gave me structure because you're a mom. You can't die now.
There's these three little people who need you.

Speaker 10 And 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.

Speaker 10 It was always there, but, you know, triplets keep you busy. So that's how I was busy.
And then the spring of 1995 happened.

Speaker 10 I got the phone call again from Mike Galden. It's now been almost 11 years.
And he calls me and says, hey, like, I need to come and see you.

Speaker 10 I'm bringing the assistant district attorney of Alamance County with me. And I was like, okay, you know,

Speaker 10 that's fine. They came 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.

Speaker 10 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 1995.
DNA was really a

Speaker 10 new piece of investigation. Very few people were talking about it.
The only thing I had ever heard about DNA other than through my science classes was O.J. Simpson.

Speaker 1 DNA testing has been admissible in court since 1987.

Speaker 1 But the first time that most Americans were introduced to the idea of DNA playing a role in the criminal justice system was in 1995 during the highly televised O.J. Simpson trial.

Speaker 10 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 11 years ago had now disintegrated and I would have to give a new blood sample.

Speaker 10 And I just looked at them and I said, look, I have five-year-old triplets. I cannot go through another court anything.

Speaker 10 Like, I just can't. And I said, at some point, this has to be over.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 So I went to the doctor and I had my doctor, my doctor, draw my blood and give it to them. And it went down I-40 headed to Raleigh, North Carolina to the State Bureau of Investigations Crime Lab.

Speaker 10 That would be March of 95.

Speaker 10 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 point to the fact that it had been Ronald all along.

Speaker 10 And then they called me the 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 Poole.

Speaker 1 Bobby Poole's DNA matched blood collected from Mary Reynolds' home, the second victim who was attacked the same night as Jennifer.

Speaker 1 Investigators confronted Bobby Poole with the results of the DNA test, and he confessed to raping both Mary Reynolds and Jennifer Thompson.

Speaker 9 I mean, how did you even take that information in?

Speaker 1 What did you think?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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 the confusion.
I felt paralyzed.

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 10 I remember Mike Galden and Rob Johnson, who was the ADA, look at me and say,

Speaker 10 We're going to get Ronald out of prison as quickly as we can. We don't want him to spend another day in prison.
He doesn't and shouldn't

Speaker 10 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 Poole, which for them was really important.

Speaker 10 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 to us.

Speaker 10 Like, you know, it would come to light that he had committed 24 more violent crimes before he was ever apprehended, six of which would be first-degree rapes.

Speaker 10 And one of the rapes he committed, he went back and raped the woman a second time.

Speaker 10 And so there's a lot of things that you're now having to reconcile that Ronald Cotton was in prison for 11 years for something he never did.

Speaker 10 And that Bobby Poole 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

Speaker 10 is that the system failed me too, but that wasn't the story that the public heard for the next few years.

Speaker 1 Current research on eyewitness identification shows that when victims are presented with a police lineup, the overwhelming majority of people will choose someone from that lineup, regardless of if the actual perpetrator is present.

Speaker 1 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 happens subconsciously.

Speaker 1 It's important to note that Bobby Poole's photo was not part of the initial photo lineup that Jennifer was shown. He was also not at the physical lineup.

Speaker 1 Jennifer ID'd Ronald Cotton twice before the trial, during the trial, and then again in 1987 when he was retried.

Speaker 1 Bobby Poole, her actual rapist, was there in 1987 at the retrial in the courtroom with Jennifer, but she did not recognize him.

Speaker 1 Her brain had replaced any memory of Bobby Poole's face with Ronald Cotton's.

Speaker 9 The story that came out over the course of the years that followed did not reflect that you were also a victim of this system.

Speaker 9 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 10 I was told there would be media coverage. Again, you know, this is 1995.
Ronald was the 23rd person, I believe, in the United States to have been exonerated using DNA.

Speaker 10 He was the first person in the state of North Carolina to be exonerated through DNA, but it was the first time that a DNA test had also revealed the actual perpetrator.

Speaker 10 So it was an enormous story across the country, and it was being covered by every newscast that you can possibly imagine.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 But at this point, nobody understood what was happening to crime victims and survivors from these cases.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 So what I decided to do at that time was 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.

Speaker 10 I have to say, like I really kind of like disappeared for the next year until somebody found me.

Speaker 1 Who found you?

Speaker 10 What had happened was there was a producer with Frontline. who wanted to do a documentary about eyewitness identification and the fallibility of human memory.

Speaker 10 And this person contacted contacted Barry Schuck. And Barry Schuck was like, There's this story out of North Carolina.
If you can find the girl, so people started trying to find the girl.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 But eventually, Ben Loderman, who was the producer, contacted me, flew down from Boston, sat with me in my house and said, this is what I'm going to do. I would really love for you to tell your story.

Speaker 10 And of course, my first impulse was like, oh, hell no. No way.

Speaker 10 No way I'm going to do this. My kids now are six and people are going to try to find me and kill me.
Then he said, well, I've talked to Ronald and he's going to tell his story.

Speaker 10 And I knew very quickly that no one could tell my story but me because you're not allowed to tell my story. Like I lived it.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And so over the next six months, as he put together this documentary titled What Jennifer Saw, the crew would say to me, like, oh, you know, we were with Ron yesterday. He's such a nice guy.

Speaker 10 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 11 years in prison for something he didn't do.

Speaker 10 There's just no way. The documentary aired in February of 97.
And I remember watching it the next morning. And I heard myself say that I know that he's innocent, but I still see him in my nightmares.

Speaker 10 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? Because I can't.

Speaker 10 So I called Mike Galden and I said, can you set up a meeting? I don't even want to know where I'm meeting because because every journalist in the country was now trying to find me.

Speaker 10 When I tell you every journalist in the country was trying to find me, I mean everybody.

Speaker 10 So they set it up a private meeting and I met Ronald in April of 97, not far from where I'd been raped 13 years before.

Speaker 10 We 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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 Poole, who had caused every single bit of it.

Speaker 10 Bobby Poole had done so much violence and it hurt so many women, but he also sat back and knew that Ronald was going to prison for what he had done to all of us.

Speaker 10 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 Poole had been the perpetrator of all of it.

Speaker 1 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 10 Well, in my head, of course, he was just this terrible, violent monster.

Speaker 10 In reality, he was incredibly gentle and soft-spoken he was huge like that was the other thing like he said he was enormous he's like six foot four i'm five foot one like he was like this big huge person in my life and yet he was very soft spoken and very gentle and kind and funny and safe

Speaker 10 like i immediately felt safe with him It was a complete and utter shift. And we immediately became friends that day.

Speaker 10 Like we parted in each other's arms, sharing each other's contact information and promising that like we had lived this journey, we had survived this thing together, and this was our story.

Speaker 1 It sounds like you really did become friends with him. You both were really going through it in different ways and different scenarios, right? Over those 11 years.

Speaker 1 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 10 I think it was helpful on many, many levels. So, yes, it was very helpful in the healing process because

Speaker 10 Ronald was probably the only person who could understand in this weird way what I had gone through because both of us had lost. Both of us could not return to the former person that we were before.

Speaker 10 Both of us grieved. And so we had these shared experiences, different,

Speaker 10 but shared experiences.

Speaker 10 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,

Speaker 10 on many quests.

Speaker 10 One of the quests I went on was to understand the criminal justice system and the legal system and how it actually works and who it actually works for and and who does it actually fail and fail often.

Speaker 10 So that forced me to really look back on my childhood and my life of growing up in the segregated South and that kind of birthright of thinking that the system was the best in the world and it was effective and it worked.

Speaker 10 And that completely shifted everything for me. And I began to question everything.

Speaker 10 I mean, it wasn't just like criminal justice system processes, but environmental justice and, you know, economic justice.

Speaker 10 Like it really started me thinking and studying and understanding and pulling back layers and asking the deep, really hard questions, which I hope I never stop asking those questions.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And when it gets it wrong, how many people are being harmed by it.

Speaker 10 Like 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't encode under what circumstances.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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 1 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 10 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.

Speaker 10 Let's just be clear. Like I'm still being blamed.
I won't allow it anymore. That's the difference.

Speaker 10 I allow the blame to take place for, gosh, the good 12, 15 years 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.

Speaker 10 And so, yeah, the general public wanted to blame me. The criminal justice system was happy for me to accept the blame.

Speaker 1 Over the following years, Jennifer and Ronald gave many talks together and were interviewed dozens of times. They would eventually go on to co-author a book, Picking Cotton, in 2009.

Speaker 1 Jennifer writes in that book about the overwhelming guilt she felt for misidentifying Ronald.

Speaker 1 She also notes that that guilt did not assuage the trauma she was already experiencing from being violently attacked in her home at age 22.

Speaker 1 But suddenly, in the public's eye, she was no longer a victim.

Speaker 10 The blame could look as innocuous as Ron Ron and I standing on a stage, and somebody throws their hand up and says, Wow, Ron, man, you're like Jesus Christ.

Speaker 10 You're just like Jesus. Like, how do you stand next to her and be her friend and forgiver?

Speaker 10 And for a long time, I was like, I just, I guess I'm just going to have to take this. I now push back on that a lot.
But that's the innocuous stuff, right?

Speaker 10 The more in my face, violent blame would be the death threats. Men saying things to me about rape, such as

Speaker 10 one man looked at me and said, you know, I got to say, like, at least the son of a bitch that raped you had good taste. Those were the things I've heard for decades.
And that's traumatic.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And, you know, somebody listening to this podcast, I will promise you, there will be somebody listening to this podcast that's 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?

Speaker 10 What would I say to my mother if this was her story? Like, what would I say to my daughter if this was my daughter's story? Would I blame my daughter? No, you wouldn't blame your daughter.

Speaker 10 I would hope you wouldn't blame your daughter.

Speaker 1 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 Poole 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.

Speaker 1 You were studying him. You were planning on how do I get justice, not just for yourself.
At first it was, but then also for other victims as well. Then you were getting confirmation the whole time.

Speaker 1 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 9 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.

Speaker 9 That makes total sense. Her recollection of that is escaping me.
Did you ever learn anything about what gave her that level of conviction to call and say that?

Speaker 10 Yeah, and I really appreciate you asking that question because Ron and I did not understand this until the book was published.

Speaker 10 And this woman came to visit Ronald and said that she had been given a typed statement from another police officer to call in in exchange for drug charges against she and her son to be dropped.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 9 That's mind-blowing. It's actually worse than anything I thought you were going to say.

Speaker 10 Yeah. Yeah.
And neither one of us knew about that phone call, obviously. And the police officer who gave her the typed statement was not Mike Galdon.

Speaker 10 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 probably around 12.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And he said, but I'm going to get your ass one day. And that was the cop.

Speaker 1 Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 When we tell people that, people always have this shock and awe, right? It's like, oh, my God.

Speaker 10 I cannot tell you how many of these stories have something like that built in.

Speaker 10 There's like this bad actor. And so again, it's like this kind of knee-jerk reaction to blame people.
Yeah, there are people that should be blamed. Absolutely.

Speaker 10 But it is not crime victims and survivors.

Speaker 1 We've all seen the news stories of someone being exonerated, walking down the steps of a courthouse, finally free.

Speaker 1 It is beyond horrifying that any innocent person is sent to prison, losing potentially years of their life for something they didn't do.

Speaker 1 And exonerations become a celebration that justice has finally prevailed. But the harm of wrongful convictions runs deep.
There's no getting those years in prison back.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Jennifer has worked with people who were victims of violent crimes, who believed that their perpetrators had been caught, and then years later, the case is reopened and still unsolved.

Speaker 10 No crime victim and no crime survivor, no murder victim family member wants an innocent person to go to prison ever.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 We want that person to be apprehended and gone to prison. We don't want an innocent person to go to prison.
But for some reason, that gets lost in the conversation, right?

Speaker 10 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 there for them during the trial, there was no one there for them during the exoneration.

Speaker 10 These are consistent themes that we see with every victim and survivor because when an exoneration happens and you pick up the newspaper or you listen to the story on the news, what you don't hear about is who the victims and survivors were.

Speaker 10 It's only about the exonery. And that is not to say that the exonerated person,

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 10 They suffered decades, decades of being separated from their families, 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

Speaker 10 and the victims and survivors many of them their children grew up without them because they can't function People are brutally kidnapped and tortured and murdered.

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 10 and then the system comes 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 statue of limitations have taken place.

Speaker 10 And the guy who raped you and sodomized you lives an hour down the road, but we can't prosecute him because you live in a state that has a statue of limitations. So sorry.

Speaker 10 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. It was failed.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 It was this place of the system failed us. And now the system wants to blame us.
And then we hear exoneries, of course, being blamed.

Speaker 10 We have a lot of people that'll 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.

Speaker 10 It's like, that doesn't mean that innocent people should go to prison. I mean, it was 1984 and best practices back then were archaic.

Speaker 10 I often, when I do speeches, I will tell people that, you know, the medical profession is always updating, right?

Speaker 10 It's always trying to get better processes, better procedures, and to cut down on infections and whatever. But the criminal justice system hasn't caught up like that.

Speaker 10 And so I'll often ask an audience, if somebody came to you and said, you have to have open heart surgery.

Speaker 10 I can do it like we did in 1937, or I can do it like we do now in 2025, which would you choose? I would imagine close to 100% of people are going to say, oh, can we do it like, you know, now?

Speaker 10 Yeah. You know, what we know now.

Speaker 10 But our legal system still operates in a very, very old-fashioned, archaic, wild west. I'm the marshal of this town.
don't tell me what to do way.

Speaker 10 And I travel and I do a lot of legislation in different states and in different jurisdictions.

Speaker 10 And I will tell you that there are police departments in this country today that just refuse to do best practices as it relates to eyewitness identification procedures, which we have.

Speaker 10 We know better ways to do it. It's just like, don't tell me what to do.
It's about closing the case. And listen, there's a lot of people that will say, well, listen, the guy's a bad guy.

Speaker 10 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 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 to succeed.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 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

Speaker 10 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 not look at them. And prison has done that for us.

Speaker 10 It's created a huge problem in this country where we have systematically put, you know, entire groups of people in certain buckets.

Speaker 10 There's a reason why prisons are not beside country clubs and golf courses, because what you don't see doesn't exist.

Speaker 10 And so for people that look like me, that makes us feel better about the world we live in.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And we have wasted tremendous talent and intellect and gifts and creativity by just blanket putting people in prison. And we've certainly not created a safer world to live in.

Speaker 1 What is the mission of healing justice? What kind of work do you do?

Speaker 10 Well, healing justice, we're 10 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.

Speaker 10 And I kept hearing about these terrible stories of the aftermath, right?

Speaker 10 Like after the exoneration happens, everybody thinks that the exonerie is going to get $10 million or that the case is going to be solved. And that's simply not true.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And so we really do kind of two things.

Speaker 10 I think 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.

Speaker 10 The other part of the work we do is bringing directly impacted individuals together to create connections and community and help people engage in what healing looks like. So we do that different ways.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And belonging is where we can create the healing. If 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.

Speaker 10 We heal in community and we heal when we're heard. We can heal when we can see each other.

Speaker 1 I am so glad that Jennifer came on our podcast and told us her story.

Speaker 9 That was so powerful because it impacted her life in so many ways. And then she sort of turned that situation on its head to do a lot of good, which brings us to Healing Justice Project.

Speaker 9 The Healing Justice Project provides crime victims and exoneries with resources and community for healing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can visit them at healingjusticeproject.org.

Speaker 1 And they also hold these retreats in which crime victims and exoneries are able to come together, meet each other, and heal together is kind of how Jennifer would describe it.

Speaker 1 There's a video on their website from one of these retreats. It's really powerful to watch.

Speaker 1 I think that one of the things that really stood out to me in Jennifer's interview is talking about how being a crime victim and going through this experience of a wrongful conviction, it really left her feeling alone and like pitted her against Ronald Cotton in a way.

Speaker 1 Once they met each other, she really felt like there was community that started to be built and healing from that.

Speaker 1 And so she took that inspiration and used it to create these retreats where she brings crime victims and exoneries together, not usually from the same case, but she said that it really helps for people to talk to someone, for someone maybe whose family member was murdered to be able to speak with an exonerie who was wrongfully convicted for murder.

Speaker 1 And so she facilitates those conversations. And I think that's just really unique and cool.
It's a powerful video. Yeah.

Speaker 9 And it really speaks to, you know, in the interview, Jennifer said when the system fails to convict the right person, then they fail everyone involved.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then I have to mention, so Jennifer and Ronald Cotton co-authored a book.
She mentions it in the interview.

Speaker 1 It's called Picking Cotton, Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption, and it's really good. We wanted to speak with Ronald.

Speaker 1 He is spending time with his family and did not want to do an interview, which we totally understand.

Speaker 1 But half of the book is written from Jennifer's perspective, and then half of it is written from Ronald's perspective.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 People should just read the book. But one of the stories floored me.
He was in North Carolina Central Prison and he talks about being mistaken for this other guy, Bobby Poole.

Speaker 1 Like even the guards called him Poole. Hey, Poole.
And he was like, that's not me. So he meets this guy, Bobby Poole, in prison, who we now know was the actual assailant of Jennifer's.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then at some point, Ronald's sister comes to visit him.

Speaker 1 And he said that he had this creepy interaction where Bobby Poole came up to him afterward and was like, hey, can I get your sister's address so I can write her?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So he said for $2, you could get like a Polaroid picture. In the book, it shows the Polaroid picture of Ronald Cotton and Bobby Poole.
And of course, he didn't send it to his sister.

Speaker 1 He sent it to his attorney. He was sentenced in January of 1985 to life in prison plus 50 years.
He meets Bobby Poole in 1986 and takes this photo in September of 1986. and sends it to his attorney.

Speaker 1 But he still spends, you know, nine more years in prison before he's exonerated. And the whole time, he was like, I know it's this guy, Bobby Poole, and he was right.

Speaker 9 That is unimaginable.

Speaker 1 It's a really good book.

Speaker 1 Jennifer and Ronald both talk in the book about a lot of their activism that they have done together over the years, speaking at different events and working together to try to raise awareness about wrongful convictions.

Speaker 9 Right, because there are a lot of people in prison proclaiming their innocence. And now, having gone through this experience, they're making sure those people have a voice.

Speaker 9 According to the Innocence Project, they have 203 clients that have been exonerated by DNA evidence.

Speaker 9 And 63% of wrongful convictions that they've worked on involved eyewitness misidentification, which is exactly how Ronald Cotton ended up in prison.

Speaker 1 That's a staggering percentage. 63% involved eyewitness misidentification.
And yet from everything that we've learned, learned, it makes sense.

Speaker 1 So the lead detective, Mike Galden, who Jennifer spoke about, he actually went on to transform the way that North Carolina approaches lineups and was really influential in instituting double-blind procedures so that the lead investigators in a case are no longer the people who are there with the eyewitness making the identifications.

Speaker 9 Oh, it's like now it has to be a more unbiased person being the middleman there. That's great.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So that you don't have that situation where someone is giving that confirmation and saying, yes, that's our suspect.
Right.

Speaker 9 And reaffirming it. Yeah.
Because then she went on to misidentify him again because of that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The fact that like she identified him again in court and then again at the retrial when Bobby Poole was actually there, she didn't recognize him.

Speaker 1 That just says so much about what our brains and memory does that there's so much that's unreliable, really, about eyewitness identification.

Speaker 9 You know, Jennifer had this added pressure because the other victim, who we now know to be Bobby Poole, said, no, I cannot provide eyewitness testimony. She was unable to say what he looked like.

Speaker 9 And so Jennifer was being reaffirmed by investigators and also this idea that she was helping the other victim.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, thanks for listening, and we will be back next week for an off-record.

Speaker 9 If you have a story for us, we would love to hear it. Our email is thenife at exactlyrightmedia.com, or you can follow us on Instagram at the Knife Podcast or Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

Speaker 1 This has been an exactly right production, hosted and produced by me, Hannah Smith, and me, Tayshia Eaton.

Speaker 9 Our producers are Tom Breifogel and Alexis Amorosi.

Speaker 1 This episode was mixed by Tom Breifogel.

Speaker 9 Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

Speaker 1 Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.

Speaker 9 Artwork by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 1 Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

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Speaker 19 All right, good people, what's up? It's Questlove, and I'm really excited to announce that my podcast is back with new episodes, a new logo, and yes, even a new name.

Speaker 19 So welcome to QLS 2.0, the Quest Love Show. New conversations are on the way with some incredible guests like journalist term filmmaker Cameron Crowe.

Speaker 20 It's like the Barry Gordy thing, you know, if you send me a letter and it's B-A-R-R-Y, you didn't take the time to know how my name was spelled, and I can't take the time to know what you want from me.

Speaker 19 Listen to the Questlove Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.