Healing: The Wound of Hatred

On a July night in 1984, twenty-two-year-old Jennifer Thompson, a white college senior, awoke to find that a stranger had broken into her North Carolina apartment and was crouching beside her bed. As he began to assault her, she told herself that if she survived, she needed to identify him so he couldn’t hurt any other girls. So, as difficult as it was, Jennifer forced herself to burn the details of his image into her memory. 

Finally seeing an opportunity to escape, she ran to a neighboring house. The residents let her in and called the police, who took her to the hospital. When a detective asked if she could recognize her assailant if she saw him again, Jennifer replied she could. The police drove her to the station to create a composite image of her Black assailant.

A few days later, Jennifer returned to the police station for a photo ID session. After positively identifying a photo, she was assured that she had done “great.” Some days later, she returned for a lineup. Unlike what is usually depicted on television, the room allowed witnesses and suspects to see one another. Jennifer’s breath was taken away as she looked at one of the men and identified him as her assailant. 

Again, Jennifer was congratulated. Ronald Cotton was the man she previously identified from his photo and the man whom the police suspected. A twenty-two-year-old who bore a strong resemblance to the composite image, Ronald had heard the police were looking for him and went to the station to clear his name. He couldn’t believe it when they assembled a lineup, Jennifer identified him as her assailant, and the police arrested him.

At his trial, Ronald pleaded not guilty. But when Jennifer testified and was asked if she saw the man who assaulted her, she pointed him out and confidently said, “Yes.” When asked if she was sure, she again said, “Yes.” When Ronald’s defense attorney asked him during a break if he wanted to plead guilty in hopes of a plea bargain, Ronald refused. He said he was innocent. God knew it, and he knew it. 

The jury found Ronald guilty. The judge announced the sentence: life in prison. Understandably, Jennifer felt intense relief—she was finally safe. Perhaps now her nightmares would end, and she could try to rebuild her shattered life. 

Ronald, however, felt his life was over.

After a few months in prison, Ronald noticed another inmate, Bobby Poole, who also strongly resembled the composite of Jennifer’s attacker. Learning that Poole had lived in the same town as Jennifer and Ronald, and was serving a sentence for an identical charge, Ronald became convinced that Poole was Jennifer’s assailant. At one point, Poole even admitted his guilt to another inmate. Ronald and Poole looked so alike that guards would confuse them. 

When Ronald’s father next visited him, Ronald told him about wanting to kill Poole and the reason why. His father cautioned that he believed in his son, but if he killed Poole, Ronald would belong in prison. The next day, Ronald dropped the knife he had fashioned down a drain where no other inmate would ever find it.

Three years after the assault, another woman who was attacked the same night as Jennifer came forward and also accused Ronald. A new trial was held at which Ronald and Poole were questioned as the two women watched and listened. Both women said Ronald was their attacker. He was declared guilty and given a second life sentence. 

He continued saying that he was innocent. 

Then, in 1995, Ronald learned that the authorities were re-examining his and Poole’s blood samples together with a remaining sample from the crime scene using a newly developed DNA test kit. The completed tests linked Poole to both assaults. When told about the DNA results, he finally confessed to both crimes. On June 30, 1995, Ronald was declared innocent of all charges and walked out of the courtroom a free man. 

After a mortified Jennifer learned Ronald was innocent, she swung between fear—surely he must be wishing her dead, just like she had wished him so every day—to personal recrimination. How could she have been so stupid to identify the wrong man! So many lives have been impacted. An innocent man lost eleven years of his life. All because of her.

Over the next two years, both Ronald and Jennifer worked to restart their lives. One day, during a television interview, Ronald spoke of how he wondered why Jennifer had never contacted him. On hearing this, Jennifer, overwhelmed with guilt and shame, summoned her courage and called the police chief. He had been the detective on her case. She wanted to meet Ronald; could the chief arrange it? He could, and did.

When Ronald and Jennifer met, he watched intently as she looked him in the eye and apologized. Ronald later wrote of how in prison he had learned to read a person’s sincerity in their eyes, a crucial survival skill. As Jennifer and he talked, and shared eye contact, he felt that—he knew that—she was genuinely, heartbreakingly sorry. If there were any way of undoing what she had done, she would have. 

Ronald softly told her that he had long since forgiven her–that he wasn’t angry with her. Equally important, he didn’t want her to fear him. He wanted both of them to move on and be happy. Continuing to look into Jennifer’s eyes, finally, for the first time, he didn’t see hate. Instead, he saw pain and remorse. Looking back at Ronald, Jennifer saw forgiveness and gentle inner strength, not anger. 

Ronald later wrote that he had years to think about what had happened. And he had decided to let go of anger. “Anger would have just kept me stuck, as if I never left prison.”1 Learning from the trials all that Jennifer had gone through, Ronald understood why she hated her assailant. What he still didn’t understand was why she believed he was the man who had attacked her. Why it was his face that terrified Jennifer in her dreams and haunted her memories of that night. 

As Jennifer later learned, memories are not always dependable, not clear-cut and precise like a video of an event, as accurate years later as the day they were made. Imperfect and unreliable, memories aren’t fixed and always available. They aren’t re-runnable and consistent every time. Unconscious, unintentional input from outside a memory can alter it. And there can be gaps in the memory that the brain tries to make sense of. It can all be very messy, all the while feeling totally accurate. Such a faulty memory had contributed to Jennifer’s identifying and hating Ronald.  

Understanding all that she had been through, Ronald felt profound sympathy for her. With that sympathy, the knowledge that he was innocent, and faith that God knew it too, Ronald could not harbor any ill will toward her. She wasn’t his enemy. She never had been. Indeed, he and Jennifer shared a bond in that both were victims of the same man, a man who had irrevocably altered the trajectory of Jennifer’s life and pretty much destroyed Ronald’s. A man who, in refusing to admit he was the attacker, even when already in prison, had continued victimizing them by refusing to confess. Ronald and Jennifer both needed to heal. Ronald began by choosing to forgive Jennifer.

Overwhelmed by Ronald’s unconditional forgiveness, Jennifer realized how powerful forgiveness could be. She had been trying to heal, but the recurring image of Ronald’s face had made it impossible. Her learning that Poole was her attacker and Ronald’s telling her he had long since forgiven her changed everything. Forgiveness enabled her to begin to heal after eleven years of fear and hate, and an additional two years of self-recrimination and remorse. 

When Jennifer learned that she had identified the wrong man, she tortured herself with the awareness of the pain and suffering she had caused Ronald and so many other people. But that all went away when Ronald forgave her. The hate that Jennifer had held for him was swept away. It also helped her to begin forgiving herself for having identified the wrong man. She had been so sure. But so wrong! Despite everything, Ronald had forgiven her and helped her to forgive herself. His forgiveness helped them both to heal.

Forgiveness is power. 

We have the power to choose, to take a very different direction from our current one. We can go onto a path where we live a life that benefits us and others.

Forgiveness enables us to regain control of our lives and recover by understanding that healing cannot exist in the presence of hatred. Forgiveness–relinquishing hate–provides the power for us to mend. 

Hatred is like a wound we refuse to let heal. A wound that, every time we consider it, we pick at. Due to this inability to leave our wound alone, it will gradually become inflamed and then infected, growing larger and uglier. Increasingly painful and progressively insidious. Potentially fatal. When we don’t allow the wound to heal, it can develop a nasty-looking scab, an ever-present reminder of the pain we cannot, will not, let go of.

The way to heal the wound of hatred is to realize the suffering it is causing and will continue to cause. How? As with any wound, we start by cleansing it. With the decision to change fully embraced, we start by washing away contaminants, the mental and emotional ones, including fear, bitterness, self-centeredness. Next, we apply a healing balm, a salve of understanding and sympathy. While one application of balm may be sufficient to help a physical injury heal, healing a wound of hatred can take considerably longer. But even an initial application and the hope of additional ones can help ease our pain. 

Even better is that we can eliminate the possibility of any further injury. We learn from Ronald and Jennifer’s book, titled Picking Cotton, that they became close friends, two people who came to trust and appreciate each other.

It will help us to understand that karmic relationships—developed from interactions in our current life and in past lifetimes–result in someone insulting, embarrassing, hurting us. Such understanding can get us to the time of the incident we are so angry about. At this point, it may help to apply what we learned about the unreliability of memory.

Feeling our anger surge once again as we replay our memory, we can find that it is like a piece of Swiss cheese. Missing bits proliferate. Even with the best intentions to be fair, we’re at a disadvantage as we judge the other person and declare them guilty of harming us. Unable to factor in karmic connections from past lifetimes, the situation and the individual we are attempting to judge becomes a murky, unsolvable task.

Wouldn’t it be much wiser to remind ourselves that we know very little of all that has happened, that our memory is faulty, and our perceptions are one-sided? Remind ourselves that hatred is a wound, which, left untreated with forgiveness, will fester and grow until, like a pestilence, it destroys us.

Thus reminded, we can apply the power of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a balm, which can heal our pain and reduce our suffering. It will bring us the peace and joy that anger and wished-for revenge never will.

1. Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, Ronald Cotton, with Erin Torneo, Picking Cotton, St. Martin's Press, New York, 2009. P 225.