There are many steps along the long path to a wrongful conviction exoneration: The crime survivor, of course, or the families of the victims who weren’t so fortunate. Law enforcement investigators, prosecutors, defense attorneys, forensic scientists, victim advocates… the list is long.
But few have lived this process as profoundly and as personally as Jennifer Thompson.
As a 22-year-old, she survived a horrific rape by a stranger who forced his way into her apartment. She found the courage to report the crime, work with police to identify a suspect and testify in court against him.
But it was 1984, before the widespread use of DNA to solve crimes, and archaic police procedures on photo identification lineups led her to identify the wrong man. Ronald Cotton was sent to prison for life, steadfastly professing his innocence all the while.
It wasn’t until 11 years later that Cotton and Thompson would learn that the burgeoning field of forensic DNA testing had proven that innocence. That same test would also prove that the rapist was Bobby Poole, also serving a life sentence for rape and burglary in the same prison as Cotton.
Tragically, in those years, Poole is believed to have committed many more assaults before he was caught.
Since that day, Thompson has worked to expand the understanding of how devastating wrongful convictions can be not just to the innocent, but to survivors and their families as well. She and Cotton wrote a bestselling book, “Picking Cotton,” about their experience, and she’s spoken extensively to groups nationwide.
She’ll tell her compelling, uplifting story as the keynote speaker at the Bode 2026 Forensic DNA Conference in Baltimore April 7-10.
A heavy cost, and the myth of closure
After Cotton’s exoneration, Thompson was devastated by what he’d endured. But the aftermath also left her victimized again.
“I got set up to be like a whipping girl for wrongful convictions and eyewitness ID mistakes,” she said. “The world asked me to wear a scarlet letter. I was called a racist, I received death threats. I was asked to carry something that was not mine to carry.”
It would have been easier to withdraw, to disappear, to hide. Instead, she began to tell her agonizing story, determined to “prevent one wrongful conviction, prevent one person from going to prison, prevent one crime survivor from the harm that was caused to her,” Thompson says.
In 2013, she agreed to join an Innocent Network panel centering victims’ voices. “I was used to telling my story. I had told it a thousand times.”
But the moderator went where no one had before. “How did the wrongful conviction harm you?” she asked Thompson.
“I couldn’t speak. I just started to cry. No one had ever given me permission to say the wrongful conviction had created an incredible amount of damage and trauma to my life, too,” Thompson recalls.
“That did something to me that day. Why is it that crime victims and survivors are not part of this story? Maybe there’s a footnote, a blurb, a sentence or two wedged into the exoneree’s story, but that’s all. I got erased in the Ronald Cotton story, and I got blamed for the Ronald Cotton story.”
In that moment, she saw her path forward.
“I decided there had to be a place where everybody’s harm got to be seen, heard and validated,” Thompson says. “We weren’t telling the truth in these wrongful conviction stories. If people only hear half of the story, they’re not hearing the truth.
“What happened that night, what happened when the police lineup was presented and I didn’t know it was flawed… I didn’t know any of that. I got set up to fail, then I got blamed for that failure.”
Soon after, she founded Healing Justice, a nonprofit that works to prevent and alleviate the harm caused to all by wrongful convictions through transformative programs and direct support.
“I took a leap of faith: using restorative justice that addressed the harm caused by the criminal justice system. That’s why I continue to tell my story.”
The ripple effect: thousands of victims
Nearly 4,000 exonerations have occurred in the United States. And every one casts an emotional net not only over the exonerees, but also the crime victims, survivors, families – even legal teams, jurors and law enforcement.
“Tens of thousands of people are just gutted when these things happen, feeling the pain of these failures,” Thompson says. “The wrongfully convicted often are depressed, they have anxiety, they can’t sleep, their family is falling apart, they can’t get a job. It’s the same for crime victims and survivors.”
The justice system often fails these survivors as well as the wrongfully convicted, she says.
“Prosecutors, law enforcement and even defense teams don’t have a sense of what crime victims have been through. They’ve lost a sense that they have responsibility to victims and survivors.
“As you’re seeking exoneration for someone claiming innocence, remember that it’s going to reopen some very deep and painful wounds for another person and their family. I talk about this work as a ‘Yes, and…’ Yes, we do not want innocent people in prison, AND this will be the beginning of a whole other nightmare for the victims and their families.”
“Crime victims are the first person harmed, but the last person to know when a case is being reinvestigated. That feels really, really terrible. What we hear is that the offices don’t want to re-traumatize them, so they wait until the last second, then they spring it on them.”
Many survivors aren’t notified until after an exoneration occurs, or they read about it in the newspaper. “Those are the horror stories,” Thompson says. “What happens to us matters too.
“We often hear from survivors is that the information itself that creates the trauma. What’s retraumatizing is that survivors didn’t get the respect and the courtesy to know what everyone else in the case has known for the last two years. They were left in the dark.”
And after an exoneration, the blame game can be vicious, Thompson said.
“The general public and the media need to have a name to be held accountable? Who is to blame here?’ But it’s not the victims or crime survivors. It’s the person who committed the crime.”
She recounts a devastating case where an 8-year-old was raped and sodomized, then asked by police to identify her attacker. Based on a traumatized child’s recollection, a man was convicted. He served 14 years before forensic DNA testing freed him.
A rightful celebration of justice for this wrongfully convicted man and his family, certainly … but another lash of overwhelming pain and guilt for the victim, compounded by the reignited search to identify the actual perpetrator.
“It was not my job to solve the crime against my body,” she says. “Or the 8-year-old’s. But we are part of the process.”
That’s why half of Healing Justice’s work involves teaching prosecutors, defense attorneys, police and conviction integrity units how to best approach victims to lessen their trauma as exoneration work proceeds.
“Ask them if they’d like to meet, or if they you want you to call them. How often do they want updates? Let people have some choice in these decisions,” Thompson explains. “That gives them agency, which they haven’t had. The crime took away their voice, their right to make decisions, this is an opportunity to give them back something that got lost so many years ago.”
That respect also is important for forensic scientists, who play such a critical role in justice for crime victims and the wrongfully accused, she adds.
“When looking at DNA, at biological evidence, remember that’s a person’s body. I talk about that rape kit – my body was the crime scene, and that felt terrible. We tend to talk about those in a removed way – it’s easy to say, ‘vaginal swab,’ but it was part of my body that was entered. Words matter.”
Thompson also brings light to an oft-forgotten reality, known as “wrongful liberty”: For every innocent person imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit, the actual perpetrator remains free to commit additional crimes.
“There’s a guilty person out there, almost certainly creating more victims and survivors,” she says. “The criminal justice system tells victims and survivors that they’re there for them, their family, for justice, on behalf of your body and your loved one. But if they fail, they’ve created an environment where other victims and survivors are created.”
Healing Justice: listening to survivors
Healing Justice offers a range of support to anyone fighting through this devastating labyrinth of crime recovery and exoneration, including peer support, direct services and opportunities to sit with others who have survived similar harms.
Thompson says, “People just need to know that you’re going to listen. We all want to fix problems; but that’s not what they’re asking for. What they need is for someone to hold space for them and listen to their stories. Can you sit in the dark with me and bear witness to what has happened to me?”
The nonprofit connects crime victims, exonerees and their families in days-long healing retreats, where they eat together and share their heartbreak and pain. In one activity, they’re asked to smash a bowl, then try to glue it back together, a symbolic nod to the difficulty of shattered lives being rebuilt one tiny fragment at a time.
As Thompson asks at a retreat filmed by 60 Minutes: “Did anybody notice how fast and easy it was to break it, and how hard it is to put it back together again?”
The group then coats their mended bowls with golden lacquer, borrowed from the Japanese art of kintsugi. The cracks are still there, but shielded by strength and beauty.
Thompson’s keynote address at Bode 2026 will be Wednesday, April 8, at 9 a.m. Register for the conference here.