Injustice

There are a lot of ironies in the tragic case of Ronald Cotton.

(Ronald Cotton forgave rape victim Jennifer Thompson for mistakenly identifying him as her attacker, sending him to prison for 11 years. Now, they are friends.)

In 1985, Ronald Cotton was convicted of raping Jennifer Thomson, a 22-year old college student in North Carolina. But he didn't do it.

The prosecution built most of its case around Jennifer's strong and confidant eyewitness identification of her assailant. She picked him out of a photo array of six black men and then she picked him out of a live line-up. She was sure he was the one.

11 years later, DNA evidence would show that Jennifer was wrong.

The irony is that Jennifer was not your average rape victim. As soon as she realized that her rapist would harm her, she made every effort to get a good look at his face and memorize his features. Though the attack was in the dead of night, she made excuses to turn on lights throughout the duration of the rape, although her assailant would quickly tell her to turn them off. Her every effort was trained on being able to identify him in the future because she wanted to make pay for his crime.

Aside from Jennifer's powerful testimony and identification, the jury had no other evidence to lead them to Ronald, except for some small misfortunes. Under Ronald's bed, police found a red flashlight (which was a popular model that thousands of people owned) that looked like the flashlight that the rapist had used. They also found some tennis shoes that lacked some foam on the tread, like the foam the rapist had left behind on Jennifer's apartment floor (which also could've been the kind of foam on thousands of people's tennis shoes). And unfortunately for Ronald, he was too confused when he was first questioned by the police about his alibi and told them faulty information. The fact that Ronald had prior convictions of attempted rape and breaking and entering only made his plight more hopeless.

However, the last and greatest irony in this sad case concerns a man named Bobby Poole. While Ronald was in jail for the first couple of years, his cellmate and prison workmate, Bobby Poole, admitted to some prisoners that he was the one who actually raped Jennifer Thomson that night. Bobby knew that Ronald was in jail for his crime. Yet being the scumbag that he is, he never told the authorities and continued to let Ronald suffer unjustly.

The saddest irony is that, after nearly two years of Ronald's wrongful incarceration and much effort on Ronald and his lawyer's part, Bobby Poole was actually put on trial for the rape of Jennifer Thompson. But during that trial, Jennifer looked straight at him and said, "I've never seen this man in my life. He's not the one who raped me. I'm sure."