...Picking Cotton In the past decade, eyewitness testimonies have cast a shadow on what is wrong with the justice system in today’s society. Before we had the advanced technology, we have today, eyewitness testimonies were solid cold-hard facts when it came to proving the defendant was guilty. However, time has changed and eyewitness testimonies have proven to be the leading causes of wrongful convictions due to misidentification. The Thompson and Cotton case is a perfect example of how eyewitness testimonies can put an innocent man behind bars. Jennifer Thompson was your average young independent adult trying to earn a degree at Elon College in Burlington, North Carolina. She had a boyfriend, Paul, who commuted from Burlington to Chapel Hill, where he was a first year business student at University of North Carolina. Only being twenty-two years, she had her life ahead of her until one late July night in 1984. Jennifer Thompson was sleeping alone in her apartment, when she suddenly woke up by a strange noise that turned out to be a stranger breaking into her apartment. The intruder held her a knife to her throat and proceeded to rape her. With no chance of escaping the attacker, she did the only thing she thought she could do and that was to analyze the intruder’s physical characteristics and facial features to her best ability so authorities could catch the perpetrator. Jennifer outwits the attacker and lives to tell about the night she can never forget. When Jennifer was able...
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...People Behind Picking Cotton University of Kentucky Abstract Within the novel, Picking Cotton, the issue of misconceptions and false eye witness accounts comes into play. On a warm June night in 1984, Jennifer Thompson woke up to find a man in her room and was then forcefully raped by him. Throughout the incident, Jennifer continued to analyze the man raping her in hopes of guaranteeing he was brought to justice. She looked at his facial features and clothing and body type. When it came time to chose someone out of the lineup, she was 100% sure that she had chosen the correct perpetrator- Ronald Cotton. After Ronald is convicted and sent to jail, Jennifer begins to rebuild her life while Ronald’s life begins to fall apart. The story then switches to the point of view of Ronald, who explains his side of the story and emphasizes his innocence. It was not until DNA testing came around that Ronald was able to truly prove his innocence. The overlaying theme of this story is that Jennifer’s eyewitness account was so strong that a jury believed, without a doubt, that Ronald Cotton was the man responsible for the rape of Jennifer Thompson. This certainty was quickly dispelled by DNA testing and brings about the problem of misconceptions. Jennifer thoroughly believed that Ronald was her rapist and this proves how easily it is for people to misidentify features of different races. It also helps to disprove eye witness accounts (Thompson-Cannino & Cotton, 2009, p.1-287). ...
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...Shelton Harris PSY-150-01 Picking Cotton by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton With Erin Torneo St. Martin’s Press, 2009 Picking Cotton was an extremely well read. I also enjoyed the fact that it took place in North Carolina, particularly Burlington. The books other settings include various prisons in the North Carolina/Tennessee areas. The main idea of the book is based off of the events that happened around 3:00 a.m., one hot Sunday morning in July of 1984. Jennifer Thompson-Cannino (then just Jennifer Thompson), a Caucasian college student in the area, was awakened by an African-American in her apartment, and eventually taunted and raped. Although one might say that Jennifer is the main focus of the book, another might say the main focus is on another individual: Ronald Cotton; the man accused of the crimes against Jennifer Thompson and eventually another woman, by the name of Mary Reynolds, who, in my opinion, holds a generally insignificant role in the book. Jennifer Thompson was fairly short and blonde haired, I believe I read that she was nineteen at the time. She seemed like any other normal college female, it didn’t seem as though she was one to stand out in a crowd, her personality seemed polite, and she had “normal” relationships with friends, family and her boyfriend at the time: Paul, who was from Burlington, but was enrolled in school in Chapel Hill. She did some partying, occasionally, and dabbled in illegal drugs. However, in my opinion...
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...many reasons why eyewitness identification are dangerous. First of all, memory is not accurate. Second, memory can be altered by other environmental factors and contaminated by new memories. And last but not least they have a tremendous power on the outcome of a trial. Some of the steps that the legal system can take to fix the problem are: to accept the fact that there is a problem, get informed and make changes to fix this problem that is affecting the life of many innocent victims. In North Carolina, Ronald Cotton was convicted for one count of rape and two more for burglary and sentenced to life and 54 years in the year of 1987. He was Identified by Jennifer Thomson as the man who entered her apartment, searched through her belongings, cut the phone cables, sexually assaulted her , fled away, and raped another women half a mile away. During the assault Jennifer try to study the face of her aggressor, in her mind, she was 100% sure of how the assailant would look like if she just had him in front of her. She worked with a detective to create a composite sketch and a few days later, she was informed they had a suspect. Her accuracy to identify the picture of her aggressor was low at choosing one picture out of five , she admits having a hard time identifying her aggressor. She even compares the feeling to the one students feel when taking a multiple choice test. Ronald was locked up and days later put up in a physical line up. Jennifer picked Ronald Cotton for the second...
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...Assignment: The reliability of eyewitness testimony SCI 110-Introduction to Physical Science Prof. Etheridge Jennifer Thompson-Cannino stood in a police department in 1984 looking through a window at five African-American male suspects. Mrs. Cannino was trying to pick out the man who burglarized her home and sexual assaulted her. She was shown five black similar looking males. After a few minutes she picked number #5, a man name Ronald Cotton. When asked was she sure he was the guy, her response was,”I think this is the guy”. Due to her eyewitness testimony, Mr. Cotton was tried, convicted and sentenced to life plus 54 years. This would have seemed like an open and shut case, except for the fact that Mrs. Cannino picked the wrong man. (www.slate.com). So in a case like this what happened? How could she pick the wrong man? Did she feel pressure to pick someone? Were the police under pressure to arrest someone? Did Mrs. Cannino actually see the rapist face? All these questions have convinced me that eyewitness testimony may be not reliable. In the event of a trauma, a person’s mental state has been comprised. Fear, adrenaline, and survival kicks in. A person must use their senses, skills, and wit to help themselves out of a sticky situation especially if it involves another person as a threat. With that being said, it is safe to rely 100% on a person memory? We have to take into consideration the level of the crime and persons involved, and how well people can recall minor...
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...set free. It is not always good to put so must trust in eye witnesses because we are all human and we make plenty of mistakes. Jurors are influenced by what eyewitnesses have to say and usually base their decision on the eyewitness’s testimony and evidence. They sometimes rely too much on them which cause problems in the legal system. This issue and problem has occurred on numerous occasions and had led to many wrongful convictions. In the Greene book, it states that errors can occur at the moment the crime is committed at any of the three phases of the memory process: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Also, questioning and new experiences can alter what is remembered from the past. It is good ideas to have psychologists testify as expert witnesses so they can point out the problems in eyewitness testimony and to be able to question their memory. In the Ronald Cotton case, he was charged with rape and burglary and sentenced to life in prison plus 54 years. When the case was sent to appeals, his sentence was overturned because one of the victims picked out a different man in the lineup and none of the DNA matched Cotton. A man who was convicted of similar crimes admitted to the crimes that were associated with Cotton. This just shows eyewitness misidentification and how innocent people can remain in prison for several years for a crime committed for by someone else. These two articles integrate because eyewitnesses are not always correct and they claim they are positive about...
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...have the right to reopen a case? • Who should pay for the testing? • How is the credibility of our legal system affected by the fact that numerous people have been convicted and then exonerated of a crime? 3. Would you vote to convict a person of a crime based solely on DNA evidence? Follow-Up Questions • Would you be more or less comfortable with convicting a person of a crime based solely on DNA evidence than with convicting a person based on eyewitness testimony? • Other than scientific evidence, what else might influence the decision of a jury? • If the case were heard by a technology-savvy jury, would the verdict have been different? • If the memories of an eyewitness are open to contamination, how can we trust what honest people see? • Should eyewitnesses that wrongly implicate a person for a crime be held accountable for damages? • Should a wrongly convicted person seek damages and restitution? What would be the implications for our legal system? • How does the questionable nature of eyewitness testimony affect the use of DNA forensics? Internet Research links Killer’s Trial (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sheppard/) From WGBH Boston, this is a collection of on-line resources that accompany a NOVA special investigating the Sam Sheppard murder case. The site includes a simple, interactive tutorial on DNA fingerprinting. Technology and Society Activity The site includes a more thorough review of the murder case and the evidence, or lack of evidence...
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...individuals have been wrongfully convicted in capital cases. Their work inspired many people to begin researching this issue. The public plays a more important role in everyone’s everyday life then people think. Often there is a struggle for the exonerees to return back to a normal life. The things they experience while incarcerated change their lives forever and often people don’t understand that they are in fact innocent and never committed a crime. The main causes of wrongful conviction include: eyewitness misidentification, improper forensic science, false confessions, and informant misconduct. Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of the wrongfully convicted. Research has shown that humans have difficulty recalling events that have happened, since the human brain is not videotape we cannot be certain about the details of an event that occurred. Jurors often rely more on what people say when their on the witness stand, then DNA evidence. In the case of Ronald Cotton, a young woman was raped and asked to look at six different photos. When she thought she has narrowed it down to two she said, “I think this is the guy.” This rest of this man’s life is at stake and he is put away because the girl “thinks” that it was him who committed the crime. The next common cause of...
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...CALIFORNIA CALIFORNIA An Interpretive History TENTH EDITION James J. Rawls Instructor of History Diablo Valley College Walton Bean Late Professor of History University of California, Berkeley TM TM CALIFORNIA: AN INTERPRETIVE HISTORY, TENTH EDITION Published by McGraw-Hill, a business unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. Copyright © 2012 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Previous editions © 2008, 2003, and 1998. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written consent of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., including, but not limited to, in any network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning. Some ancillaries, including electronic and print components, may not be available to customers outside the United States. This book is printed on acid-free paper. 1234567890 QFR/QFR 10987654321 ISBN: 978-0-07-340696-1 MHID: 0-07-340696-1 Vice President & Editor-in-Chief: Michael Ryan Vice President EDP/Central Publishing Services: Kimberly Meriwether David Publisher: Christopher Freitag Sponsoring Editor: Matthew Busbridge Executive Marketing Manager: Pamela S. Cooper Editorial Coordinator: Nikki Weissman Project Manager: Erin Melloy Design Coordinator: Margarite Reynolds Cover Designer: Carole Lawson Cover Image: Albert Bierstadt, American (born...
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...FAMILY OF SECRETS The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years RUSS BAKER Contents Foreword by James Moore 1. How Did Bush Happen? 2. Poppy’s Secret 3. Viva Zapata 4. Where Was Poppy? 5. Oswald’s Friend 6. The Hit 7. After Camelot 8. Wings for W. 9. The Nixonian Bushes 10. Downing Nixon, Part I: The Setup 11. Downing Nixon, Part II: The Execution 12. In from the Cold 13. Poppy’s Proxy and the Saudis 14. Poppy’s Web 15. The Handoff 16. The Quacking Duck 17. Playing Hardball 18. Meet the Help 19. The Conversion 20. The Skeleton in W.’s Closet 21. Shock and . . . Oil? 22. Deflection for Reelection 23. Domestic Disturbance 24. Conclusion Afterword Author’s Note Acknowledgments Notes Foreword When a governor or any state official seeks elective national office, his (or her) reputation and what the country knows about the candidate’s background is initially determined by the work of local and regional media. Generally, those journalists do a competent job of reporting on the prospect’s record. In the case of Governor George W. Bush, Texas reporters had written numerous stories about his failed businesses in the oil patch, the dubious land grab and questionable funding behind a new stadium for Bush’s baseball team, the Texas Rangers, and his various political contradictions and hypocrisies while serving in Austin. I was one of those Texas journalists. I spent about a decade...
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...1000 Real GMAT Sentence Correction Questions 1. 1 A “calendar stick” carved centuries ago by the Winnebago tribe may provide the first evidence that the North American Indians have developed advanced full-year calendars basing them on systematic astronomical observation. (A) that the North American Indians have developed advanced full-year calendars basing them (B) of the North American Indians who have developed advanced full-year calendars and based them (C) of the development of advanced full-year calendars by North American Indians, basing them (D) of the North American Indians and their development of advanced full-year calendars based (E) that the North American Indians developed advanced full-year calendars based 2. A 1972 agreement between Canada and the United States reduced the amount of phosphates that municipalities had been allowed to dump into the Great Lakes. (A) reduced the amount of phosphates that municipalities had been allowed to dump (B) reduced the phosphate amount that municipalities had been dumping (C) reduces the phosphate amount municipalities have been allowed to dump (D) reduced the amount of phosphates that municipalities are allowed to dump (E) reduces the amount of phosphates allowed for dumping by municipalities 3. A collection of 38 poems by Phillis Wheatley, a slave, was published in the 1770’s, the first book by a Black woman and it was only the second published by an American woman. (A) it was only the second published by...
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...In Cold Blood Truman Capote I. The Last to See Them Alive The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there's much to see simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building...
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...In Cold Blood Truman Capote I. The Last to See Them Alive The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there's much to see simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building...
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...updated: April 26, 2016 Logical Reasoning Bradley H. Dowden Philosophy Department California State University Sacramento Sacramento, CA 95819 USA ii iii Preface Copyright © 2011-14 by Bradley H. Dowden This book Logical Reasoning by Bradley H. Dowden is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. That is, you are free to share, copy, distribute, store, and transmit all or any part of the work under the following conditions: (1) Attribution You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author, namely by citing his name, the book title, and the relevant page numbers (but not in any way that suggests that the book Logical Reasoning or its author endorse you or your use of the work). (2) Noncommercial You may not use this work for commercial purposes (for example, by inserting passages into a book that is sold to students). (3) No Derivative Works You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. An earlier version of the book was published by Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont, California USA in 1993 with ISBN number 0-534-17688-7. When Wadsworth decided no longer to print the book, they returned their publishing rights to the original author, Bradley Dowden. The current version has been significantly revised. If you would like to suggest changes to the text, the author would appreciate your writing to him at dowden@csus.edu. iv Praise Comments on the earlier 1993 edition...
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...Praise for The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down “Fadiman describes with extraordinary skill the colliding worlds of Western medicine and Hmong culture.” —The New Yorker “This fine book recounts a poignant tragedy…It has no heroes or villains, but it has an abundance of innocent suffering, and it most certainly does have a moral…[A] sad, excellent book.” —Melvin Konner, The New York Times Book Review “An intriguing, spirit-lifting, extraordinary exploration of two cultures in uneasy coexistence…A wonderful aspect of Fadiman’s book is her even-handed, detailed presentation of these disparate cultures and divergent views—not with cool, dispassionate fairness but rather with a warm, involved interest that sees and embraces both sides of each issue…Superb, informal cultural anthropology—eye-opening, readable, utterly engaging.” —Carole Horn, The Washington Post Book World “This is a book that should be deeply disturbing to anyone who has given so much as a moment’s thought to the state of American medicine. But it is much more…People are presented as [Fadiman] saw them, in their humility and their frailty—and their nobility.” —Sherwin B. Nuland, The New Republic 3/462 “Anne Fadiman’s phenomenal first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, brings to life the enduring power of parental love in an impoverished refugee family struggling to protect their seriously ill infant daughter and ancient spiritual traditions from the tyranny of welfare bureaucrats and intolerant...
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