Picking Cotton Annotated Bibliography
Thompson-Cannino, Jennifer, Ronald Cotton, and Erin Torneo. Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010.
Print.
This autobiography goes into detail about how Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. Jennifer was able to escape and eventually identified her attacker, Ronald Cotton. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken. However, Jennifer’s positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After 11 years, Ronald was released after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he did not commit. Two years, Jennifer and Ronald met face-to-face and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives. In their own words, Jennifer and Ronald unfold the agonizing details of their tragedy and challenge our ideas of memory and judgement while demonstrating the profound nature of human
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The young woman had went to a high school party with her younger sister with no intention of consuming alcohol to the point of being lethargic. She later woke up to find herself in the hospital with no memory of what had happened the night before. The nurses and police officers involved in the situation told her that she had been raped and found behind a dumpster, but she had no recollection of the night before. Despite the evidence from the medical records, the boy who assaulted her plead guilty to only consuming alcohol in which he received no punishment, only because the young woman could not prove her case that he was, in fact, guilty because nobody else had seen the incident and she was intoxicated with no memory of the assault itself. In the end, the young woman finds the strength within herself to forgive him so that she’s able to continue her life in