Eyewitness Misidentification: Convicting the Innocent Ronald Cotton spent more than ten years serving a life-plus-54-years sentence for raping a college student, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, in her North Carolina apartment. When she first saw Cotton in a police line-up, Thompson-Cannino was not certain that he was the rapist. But by the time of the trial, after repeated questioning by the police, Thompson-Cannino was “absolutely sure” that Cotton was the rapist (Garrett, 2011). So certain was she, that when shown the actual perpetrator, who had confessed the crime to another inmate, she said she had never seen him before in her life. Ten years after Cotton’s conviction, he was freed when DNA evidence conclusively proved that he had not committed the crime and identified the other prisoner as the rapist. Today, Cotton and Thompson-Cannino are close friends and fellow activists, writing a memoir together and speaking widely to educate law enforcement personnel and others about eyewitness testimony and wrongful convictions (Thompson-Cannino & Cotton, 2009). Scores of studies have shown that eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful conviction (see Loftus, 2013; Smalarz & Wells, 2015; The Innocence Project, 2015).

AP Photo/Chuck Burton