Remembering a Wild God

Memory as a Source of Conviction

In the memorable speech that ends Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the good-hearted Alyosha proclaims, “There is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory.” In the face of family trauma, suffering, and death, he offers hope that “even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.” But while memory may be essential to redemption, it is also fragile and fickle. By it, we might be damned.

After law school, I worked for the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center (RMIC), an organization that investigates potentially wrongful criminal convictions in Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming. For about eighteen months, I analyzed cases that revealed the terribly painful consequences of memory’s weakness. I came to know and love people who spent many years in prison for crimes they did not commit because of eyewitness misidentification, which is the most common form of faulty evidence in cases of wrongful conviction.

I also carefully studied cases outside of RMIC’s ambit, including the poignant case of Jennifer Thompson-Cannino. As she describes in Picking Cotton, she mistakenly identified Ronald Cotton as her rapist despite having had an extended interaction on the night of the crime with Bobby Poole, the man that DNA evidence demonstrated was the true culprit. She recounts carefully reporting her memories to investigators shortly after the crime, feeling her memories carved onto her “like scars [she’d] never be able to cover.” At trial, she “couldn’t believe it” when Cotton’s attorney claimed the case was one of mistaken identity—“that [she] had been ‘stressed’ after the assault and couldn’t properly identify the man who had been lying on top of [her].”

But she berated herself later when evidence emphatically established she had gotten it wrong: “How could I have been in the same room as my rapist and not recoil?” she asks, reflecting on how her body responded viscerally and involuntarily to Cotton’s presence in the courtroom and reacted with nothing when she looked at Poole.

Cotton’s memory had conspired against him, too. When investigators first confronted him about the case, he provided a confident alibi only to later realize he had gotten his days mixed up. His explanation for the mistake on the witness stand sounded like desperate evasion in the face of Thompson-Cannino’s confident identification. But his seemingly weak testimony was reliable while her strong, sympathetic accusation was not. His prayers for revelation of the truth went unanswered until he was exonerated by DNA evidence in 1995, more than ten years after his conviction.