Picking Cotton

Picking Cotton Details in our lives become less and less important every single day, but what happens when we are to encounter a traumatic experience such as a kidnapping, murder, fight or rape. Our minds go blank, our hearts start pumping blood to every vital organ, and we prepare our selves for the flight or fight. In the case of Jennifer Thompson, she prepared for the fight and was determined not to be murdered by her rapist. As she cleared her mind, Jennifer tried to memorize every facial feature or distinct markings on her rapist. She wanted to make sure she encoded everything she was seeing and hearing from her assailant, but what happens when other factors alter your memories. Things such as unconscious transference, weapon focus, cross race bias or how the eye witness was questioned can play a big factor on how memories are recalled from the eye witness. These factors played a big role in Ronald Cotton’s sentencing and cost him 11 agonizing years in prison. Many believe that once we encode something in our minds it is there for ever and there is nothing that can alter or change our memory of the event, but we are wrong. Like in the case of Jennifer Thompson, she was so positive that Ronald Cotton was her assailant, she had identified him in a photo line up after describing him to a Forensic Sketch artist, and again identified him in a line up. During these two occasions, the officer’s in the case gave Jennifer assured her that she was doing great. This gave Jennifer more reassurance and confidence that she had chosen the right man, but she had not. Previous studies on post identification feedback show that “witnesses who received confirming feedback (versus no feedback) as having paid more attention, having had a better view, being better able to identify strangers, and being more confident at the time of the identification.” (Douglass et. al., 2010, p. 287). Thus Jennifer’s second and third time around identifying Ronald Cotton as her rapist

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