Jennifer Thompson Case: Rape Victim

The mind is malleable and can therefore not be used as a mental recorder, said Lesley Stahli. There has been no truer statement, a person’s recognition of visual perception can be altered by the smallest of stimuli. In the video jennifer Thompson, a rape victim, wrongly accused a man named Ronald Cotton as her attacker under the claim of having seen the attacker. She was even sat in front of her real attacker but still looked at Mr.cotton. Over 75% of people accused by eye witnesses were wrongly accused. I believe that we see what we want to see and with every event we create some solution in order to make sense of it in our minds and when asked to recall from our minds we may feel some sort of pressure to get it right so we form things in …show more content…
Last year in English we learned about the Scottsboro boys case where several African American men were accused by a white woman of rape. The only thing different from this and the Thompson case is that the alleged victim did not make a genuine mistake she knew fairly that she was lying, the fault lay in the justice system. Because the men were black they were already stereotyped to be violent and no matter what would be guilty of some crime (they basically started off with no case), and even without evidence of injury or semen the jury convicted those boys. My theory of this was that due to the negative emotions and experiences that people in those days had tied to black people their mind somehow made everything that was and was not presented to them meaningless since it was already in their heads that they were guilty by default. In the beginning I said ‘we see what we want to see’ but now I must add on ‘we believe what we want to believe’; we have free will. The jury wanted to believe the men were guilty since they were all southern males who did not favor people of color as well as there was an ‘eyewitness’. In addition I relate the way ‘eyewitness testimonies’ are talked about as a science experiment. The person starts of with a hypothesis (in Thompson it was an idea of who it was), then they perform the experiment and come up with results ( study the picture and choose her attacker), but even then the study is not finalized, it has to be repeated multiple times and when we the same result is achieved then the experiment is successful (she chose the same guy again on the line-up). As a bonus other scientists