The latest in my incredibly insatiable appetite for books- or is it my insatiable appetite to get other people to read the books I think they should? Hard to say.
Enough questioning my motives. This one’s important:
Jennifer Thompson-Cannino was a college student who was raped at knifepoint in her apartment shortly before she graduated. She not only managed to survive the attack, but she memorized her attacker’s features, then escaped and gave a detailed enough description for the police to make a sketch, release it to the public, and find a suspect who matched it. Jennifer then identified him in a photo array, then a line-up, and her identification was so positive that the man was convicted in a matter of hours. His name was Ronald Cotton.
He was the wrong man.
Here’s what’s most amazing about this story: Ronald Cotton himself. After eleven years of prison for a crime he never committed, this man’s grace and forgiveness to all the people involved in his conviction will — I almost guarantee it– leave you stunned. The story is written from first Jennifer’s point of view, then from Ronald’s, and then as the DNA testing is about to finally go forward, it switches back and forth between the two of them. Two years after his release, they met, and Jennifer finds her own way to forgiveness because of Ronald’s influence and friendship.
Now, the two of them speak together about the importance of better testing availibility, better eyewitness identification procedures, and their own story– so poigniantly put in the subtitle–of injustice and redemption.
Read this, seriously, and if you’ve never heard of The Innocence Project, then get over there a.s.a.p. and learn about it. Sign up for the e-newsletter, too, so you know when you’re supposed to be zipping emails to your elected officials.
BTW if you’re in Ohio– and you don’t know about Senator David Goodman’s latest sponsored bill, SB 77, check it out, then write to your senator and tell them they’d better get on board because you personally do not want innocent people in prison and guilty ones on the street. And tell them you’d really like an amendment that requires sequential lineups because that would help a lot. Standard lineups force people to think well, he looks most like the guy– at least more than all these other guys–so that must be him. When in fact, looking one at a time and answering “yes” or “no” has a much higher degree– much higher–of accuracy in eyewitness identification. And post-conviction DNA testing shouldn’t be subjected to a prosecutor’s decision, it should just be allowed. Really, how does this hurt anyone?
All right. That’s your book for the month. Get reading. And get writing. Because your state may not have a David Goodman, so you’ll have to make your senator become one.









