The Cotton Case Study

The final factor that I think can contribute to wrongful convictions is one’s race. The Cotton case occurred in 1984 and I think race majorly influenced this case. Jennifer was a young, attractive, Caucasian female that had a good background. She was a student, had a perfect GPA, a boyfriend and she was getting ready to graduate. On the other hand, Cotton is an African American, he had a past criminal record for break and entry and he was not as privileged as a Caucasian individual is. That is why I think the court just used Jennifer’s eyewitness testimony as the sole piece of evidence. If it was a Caucasian male who had a wealthy family, the story would be completely different and much more evidence would be used in that case. The fact of …show more content…
I always hear on the news that police officers shoot and kill innocent African Americans because they felt they posed a threat to them. I think during the time of the Cotton case the criminal justice system felt pressured to find someone to be held responsible for the rapes. The Cotton case was unique because the attacker raped two girls in one night so the pressure to find who did it was severe. I found an article that focused on the Cotton case and the racial divide to support my final factor. The Gazette (2010) article notes that multiple studies have found that we all have difficulty recognizing people froth other racial groups and this is known as the cross-race effect. The article goes on to say that Caucasian people struggle with recognizing African Americans. Additionally, both Jennifer and Cotton said that the cross-race effect led her to pick the wrong person and helped put him behind bars (Gazette, 2010). Cotton believed he looked nothing like Poole he said that to anyone on the outside would say him and Poole were the same (p. 117), but he believed that they looked completely