by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino

March of 1995 began like any other month for me.  The days were filled with chasing soon to be five year-old triplets, washing hundreds of pounds of laundry, kissing skinned knees and picking up toys, until the phone rang.  Captain Mike Gauldin, the detective who worked my case after a man broke into my apartment when I was a twenty-two year-old college student and raped me at knifepoint in Burlington, N.C. wanted to come see me with Rob Johnson, then the assistant D.A. of Alamance County.

They arrived before lunch and we sat on the deck enjoying the spring sunshine.  We talked about the weather, the kids, current events, and then quickly the topic changed. Ronald Cotton, the man sent away for life for attacking me, wanted a DNA test. They needed new blood drawn because my sample from the eleven year-old rape kit had deteriorated.

I had already sat through two trials and I was furious, but I didn’t hesitate. “Let’s go to the lab right now,” I responded. Within hours Mike Gauldin and Rob Johnson were headed to the SBI labs with my vial of blood. I knew the tests would show what I had known all along: that Ronald Cotton was a monster. It was Ronald Cotton who threatened to kill me, who had chased me through the rain that night while I fled for my life.  And it was Ronald Cotton who I saw every night in my nightmares, who I prayed God would have killed, and who I hated each and every day of the last eleven years.

But when Mike Gauldin and Rob Johnson stood in my kitchen in June of 1995, they told me we were wrong.  It was not Ronald’s DNA found in the rape kit, in fact, it was a man named Bobby Poole, a serial rapist who had attacked and raped over a half dozen other women that summer of 1984.

With the delivery of the DNA results came an overwhelming shame and guilt. My mind began to question everything I had believed in. I pulled away from the world as I knew it; I had no answers.  Over four thousand days of a man’s life were gone and nothing I could do would ever change that.  Eleven birthdays, eleven Christmas mornings-gone. I placed the burden on my shoulders and began the slow process of moving through my days.

By the spring of 1997, the psychological toll forced me to act. In a small church no more then a few miles from where I had been brutally raped, I met Ronald and struggled for words I could say to him. How completely inadequate “I’m sorry” seemed.  As Ronald and his new wife, Robbin, came into the room I began to cry and shake. “Ronald, if I spent the rest of my life telling you how sorry I am it wouldn’t be enough,” I said. Ronald immediately took my hands and replied, “I forgive you.  I want you to be happy and live a good life.  Don’t look over your shoulders thinking I will be there because I won’t.”

For the first time, I looked into Ronald Cotton’s eyes and saw a compassionate man who gave me a gift of healing by forgiving me. I also saw a victim of a flawed system. If California’s Senate Bill 756 can help fix that system by putting better practices and procedures into place for eyewitness identification, we reduce the risk of wrongful convictions and mistakes like the one I made. A mistake I never saw coming.

Jennifer Thompson-Cannino lives in Winston-Salem, N.C.  She is currently working on PICKING COTTON with Ronald Cotton and writer Erin Torneo.  It will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2008.

This is a post by John F. Terzano of The Justice Project

Herman Atkins suffered for 12 years in a California prison – for crimes he did not commit. Then DNA exonerated him.  Mr. Atkins was a victim of faulty eyewitness identification.

Mr. Atkins’ wrongful conviction for rape and robbery began when the victim and a witness identified him as the perpetrator after seeing his picture on a wanted poster for an unrelated crime. Then, the photo array used later by police also contained the wanted poster photo, which had already been viewed by the witnesses.

Watch three minutes of Herman’s story on YouTube:

What happened to Mr. Atkins is not as uncommon as it should be.  Eyewitness identification is notably unreliable.  According to a detailed 2004 analysis of California wrongful convictions by San Francisco Magazine, faulty eyewitness identification was a factor in 60% of the 200 cases of people proven to have been wrongly convicted in the state since 1989.

Indeed, study after study has shown that faulty eyewitness identification is one of the most common causes of wrongful convictions.  Faulty eyewitness identification played a pivotal role in 75% of the cases nationwide where DNA later exonerated the person convicted.

We now know through decades of empirical research that practical changes to identification procedures such as

• cautionary instructions to witnesses,
• effective use of fillers,
• full documentation of the lineup procedures and a witness’s statement of certainty,
• and double-blind administration

can significantly improve the accuracy of eyewitness identifications.  (Please visit The Justice Project’s web site: http://www.thejusticeproject.org/solution/eyewitness-id.html for more details of eyewitness identification reforms.)

In California, however, only the Santa Clara Sheriff and Police departments have voluntarily adopted these best practices.

The good news is that Senate Bill 756, sponsored by Senator Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles, Culver City), addresses the development of new guidelines for statewide eyewitness identification procedures.

The bill has already passed the State Senate and Assembly Public Safety Committee, and it will soon be heading to the Assembly Floor for a final vote.  An earlier version of an eyewitness reform bill was taken up in the legislature last year, but it was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. If this new eyewitness reform bill passes the Assembly, the Governor will soon have an opportunity to sign into law this important reform.

It is also important to note that in addition to improving eyewitness identification, videotaping custodial interrogations and corroborating jailhouse informant testimony have been shown to help prevent wrongful convictions. Senate Bill 511, sponsored by Senator Elaine K. Alquist (D-Santa Clara), would require full electronic recording of interrogations in both juvenile and adult cases and Senate Bill 609, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), would require corroboration for jailhouse informants.

Given the documented cases of miscarriages of justice in California – and the research indicating that many of the errors leading to wrongful convictions can be prevented – we hope that Legislators will support these three essential bills, and that the Governor will ultimately sign them into law. Lawmakers have a duty, not only to the public safety, but also to the wrongly convicted like Herman Atkins, to take the necessary steps to ensure that the state’s criminal justice system is as fair and accurate as possible.

  John F. Terzano is the President of The Justice Project, a nonpartisan organization that works to address unfairness and inaccuracy in the criminal justice system, with a focus on the capital punishment system.

Click here to help The Justice Project.