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it was an early in the morning I felt something in my room something brushed my arm and when I looked over the side of the bed I noticed it was a person's head and that's when I said who is that who's there and he immediately sprang up on the bed and straddled my body and put a knife to my throat and told me to shut up or he was going to kill me over the next twenty minutes during the assault as he raped me I made two decisions one is if there was a way I could live I would figure it out and if I lived I wanted to memorize everything about this person so I began to pay really close attention to details about his face and his eyes and his voice and his hair and how much he weighed the clothing he was wearing I was convinced that Jennifer would be able to recognize her assailant she was able to provide a detailed description not only in terms of his physical appearance but also what he wore at the time of the assault it was clear to me that she had an ample opportunity to see him coupled with her determination and presence of mind I was convinced without a doubt that she could identify her assailant more than 250 convicted prisoners have been exonerated on the basis of DNA testing in the US alone I witness misidentification played a role in more than 75 percent of those cases making it the leading contributing factor to wrongful conviction but unfortunately witnesses are often wrong how can this happen and is it possible for us to prevent these eyewitness identification errors from happening we received an anonymous tip that Ronald cotton not only fit the composite in terms of appearance but the general description of the assailant we had his photo on file and we felt like he could be a good suspect in this particular case and thought that we should do a photographic lineup within two days I was asked to come down and look at a photo array the officers said we're going to show you six photographs don't feel compelled to choose any one suspect may or may not be in there when you're in a police department and there's a photo lineup there's this sense that one of these has got to be their suspect and it's my job to find him I began to narrow it down I could very quickly discount four of them narrowing it down to two photographs according to the records Jennifer examined the two photographs for four to five minutes research shows that memory is highly malleable and that an eyewitness who is uncertain can become much more certain over time I noticed that she did focus on photograph number four for a bit then moved over to Ronald Cotton's photograph which i think was number six before picking it up and saying that this was the man who raped me and I wanted to be very confident very sure so I took my time and that's when I held up the picture of Ronald cotton and said this is the man who did this they said are you sure and I said I'm positive and they looked at me and said we thought that was the guy since the officers present knew that Ronald cotton was the suspect in this case it's possible that they unconsciously provided information to Jennifer Thompson and we do know that Jennifer Thompson's confidence was influenced by the positive feedback that she did receive after making her identification in laboratory studies researchers compared groups of participants who receive feedback to individuals who did not receive that kind of information in a control group and what we know is that people who receive feedback their confidence skyrockets just like it did for Jennifer Thompson after her identification in this case there was this huge relief that washed over me because I had gotten it right on August 8th eleven days after the assault Jennifer Thompson was brought in to view a physical lineup consisting of seven men Ronald cotton was the only lineup participant whose pitcher had been present in the photo array that Jennifer Thompson saw and repeating only one individual in multiple procedures increases witness confidence even when that witness is wrong and as we walked out of the room I remember looking at the officer saying how did I do - I - okay and when an officer said he did great that was the guy you picked out in the photo lineup by the time she testified in court and identified Ronald cotton as her assailant she was 100% certain Ronald Cotton's conviction was based primarily on the eyewitness identification evidence of Jennifer Thompson but we know that Ronald cotton was completely innocent of this crime he was exonerated based on DNA evidence in June 1995 at the same time it was learned that another man who was in prison for very similar crime was actually the person who raped Jennifer Thompson I can remember thinking to myself if that's wrong if Bobby Poole raped me and it wasn't Ronald cotton then maybe everything I thought was true is not true well she just made an honest mistake I was lucky that that was DNA evidence after having the opportunity to serve on the actual innocence Commission I learn so much about memory how it works I learned about better practices at law enforcement could utilize as it relates to eyewitness identification and it was incumbent upon me as police chief to move forward and embrace those recommendations because I certainly did not want to see this happen again to somebody else like Ronald cotton he lost 11 years of his life I firmly believe because of a faulty eyewitness policy that we had in place in 1984 and something that actually continued to be common practice until 2008 in our state when eyewitness identification reform was made law several easy to implement changes to procedures have been shown to significantly decrease the number of misidentifications in the states that have adopted them the most crucial change to procedures is the double blind administration of lineups double blind administration is when the officer who's conducting the identification procedure is not aware of which lineup member is the suspect in the case what's also critical is that the witness in the case is told that the officer doesn't know the identity of the suspect in addition to double blind administration other best practices include proper lineup composition instructions to the witness confidence statements recording the procedure and sequential presentation and we're super close we go across the country do work on judicial reform or helping to pass bills or advocating for best practices or just talking to students at college and high school level we just stay really busy you