Beruflich Dokumente
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JENNIFER:
We began to work through this identikit where you have mouths and lips, and cheeks and chins,
and noses and nostrils, and ears and everything; until you start putting together these pieces of the
face that you remember seeing.
NARRATOR MALE: Within a few days of the public appeal a number of suspects had been
suggested. Their pictures were shown to Jennifer as a photo line up.
JENNIFER:
I immediately discounted four, and you start doing the - no that's not his ears, no his ears looked
closer and that's not his nose,
and that nose really looks like his nose, and his hair's too long.
NARRATOR MALE: Jennifer had picked out a man called Ronald Cotton. Later, police called
Jennifer back to identify the suspect at a live line-up.
JENNIFER:
I remember walking into the room and there was nothing between me and this physical line-up but
a table, like a picnic table type of thing. My knees were shaking, I was sweating, my heart was
racing.
I remember looking at number four and number five and going, mmm, and then I wrote down
number five, and I handed it to the detective.
NARRATOR MALE: Number five - the man Jennifer chose - was again the suspect Ronald Cotton,
and based on her strong eyewitness identification, the case went to court. Despite protesting his
innocence, at the trial in January 1985, Cotton was convicted of rape and sentenced to life plus
fifty years in prison.
A year into his sentence, a convicted serial rapist named Bobby Paul was sent to the same prison.
The two men looked so alike that the guards often got them confused.
Cotton discovered that Paul had bragged to fellow inmates that it was he, who had raped Jennifer.
NARRATOR MALE: In north Carolina, at the time of Cotton's trial, the practice of analysing DNA
evidence was not routine, but ten years later it had become more commonplace. Cotton, still
maintaining his innocence, asked for DNA evidence to be analysed.
The DNA did not belong to Ronald Cotton it belonged to Bobby Paul.
Ten years after being wrongly convicted, Ronald Cotton was finally released.
JENNIFER:
I knew it had been my identification, I mean I knew that. It wasn't malicious intent, it wasn't racially
motivated, but it didn't matter because the end result was Ronald Cotton spent a third of his life in
prison for something he didn't do.
MIKE:
I can't tell you how many times I looked at that case and rethought it and, you know, tried to
envision what I could have differently that would have prevented it and so it was very bad.