Will I love Picking Cotton?

I found this book emotionally overwhelming in a way very few criminal justice books have ever been for me.

I have worked on many eyewitness misidentification cases, but this book personalizes the issue in such a human and heartbreaking way that it becomes impossible to dismiss as an abstract legal problem. What affected me most was not simply the wrongful conviction itself, but the extraordinary relationship that eventually develops between Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton.

I admire the honesty both authors bring to the story. Nobody is demonized, and nobody is simplified. 

This book documents the wrongful conviction of Ronald Cotton while simultaneously relating the story of Jennifer Thompson, a victim of the brutal rape Cotton was convicted of.

I love this book because it’s co-authored by Cotton and Thompson and shows both sides of the damage of wrongful convictions: the wrongfully convicted person who goes to prison for a crime he did not commit and the victim who is denied closure. Cotton’s suffering is obvious and brutal, as he writes about the pain he went through being arrested, wrongfully identified, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison plus 54 years.

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