The Florida Bar

Florida Bar News

Steppin’ Out with the Innocence Project set for Tallahassee April 16

Regular News

Steppin’ Out with the Innocence Project set for Tallahassee April 16

Jennifer Thompson stood before a cluster of microphones, eyes glistening with tears as she admitted: “I’m here to tell you that eye witnesses can make mistakes.”

Her honest mistake was made years earlier in 1984, as a 22-year-old college student who had been raped.

“One night someone broke into my apartment, put a knife to my throat, and raped me. During the ordeal, I studied every single detail of his face because I was confident, should I be allowed to see the next day that I was going to make sure that he was put in prison and he was going to rot,” she said while television cameras rolled.

She told how she went down to the police station, where they crafted a composite drawing, and several days later she picked Ronald Cotton out of a physical lineup of seven black men standing shoulder-to-shoulder, each asked to step forward and say, “Shut up or I’ll cut you.”

“I was confident I could pick the right guy and he was going to go to jail,” Thompson said.

But she picked the wrong guy.

Based largely on her eye-witness identification testimony, Cotton was convicted. When he was sentenced to life in prison, Thompson called it “the happiest day of my life. Ronald Cotton was never going to get out. He was never going to hurt another woman.”

After serving more than a decade for crimes he did not commit, DNA testing exonerated Ronald Cotton, and North Carolina Gov. James Hunt granted Cotton a pardon of innocence. DNA evidence pointed to another man, Bobby Poole, who had confessed to rapes in the area during the same time frame, evidence that Cotton’s jurors never were allowed to hear.

“The truth can set you free, but sometimes the truth will hurt you,” Ronald Cotton said after his release.

In an extraordinary friendship, bound by forgiveness and hope, Cotton and Thompson, along with writer Erin Torneo, wrote Picking Cotton, which was on the New York Times Bestseller’s List in 2009.

Thompson, who lives in North Carolina with her husband, speaks at college campuses, law schools, judicial conferences, and state legislatures about sexual violence, judicial reform, racial bias, and eyewitness identification. She has served as a commissioner on the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission.

She will be honored with the Frank Lee Smith Innocence Award, at the Steppin’Out with the Innocence Project of Florida fund-raiser dinner in Tallahassee on April 16. Smith, the namesake of the award, is Florida’s first DNA exoneree, who died of cancer on Florida’s death row before the state agreed to DNA testing.

Walter McNeil, former Tallahassee Police Chief and former secretary of the Department of Corrections, will receive the Innocence Project of Florida Partner in Justice Award “for his commitment to creating a greater sensitivity within the law enforcement community to how wrongful convictions can occur and increased vigilance to reform police practices to prevent such miscarriages of justice.”

The Partner in Justice Award “honors a person who has become a nontraditional ally of the innocence movement, working collaboratively to further the mission of diminishing the incidence of wrongful conviction.”

The event is billed as “an elegant evening celebrating justice and freedom with 14 Florida exonerees who spent more than 268 years wrongfully imprisoned.. . .

“Please join us to honor the exonerees who are already moving forward, those who have helped them do so, and the innocent who still wait to take that first step.”

Several Florida exonerees will be at the event celebrating their freedom.

The VIP reception for exonerees, sponsors and award recipients begins at 6 p.m. at Mission San Luis, 2100 W. Tennessee St., followed by the dinner and program at 7 p.m., on Thursday, April 16.

Funded solely through grants and donations, the Innocence Project of Florida hopes to raise $85,000 that will be used for litigation efforts on behalf of the wrongfully convicted men and women in Florida prisons.

Individual tickets are $125, and discounted tickets for public defenders and law school students are $100. The evening will include a silent auction, open bar, and complimentary valet parking. Tickets can be purchased by going to www.floridainnoence.org.

News in Photos