Healing Justice: Crime Victims and Exonerees Find Common Ground

Jennifer Thompson was a college student in 1984 when a man broke into her apartment and raped her at knifepoint. She worked with police, identified a suspect from a lineup, testified in court, and watched as Ronald Cotton received a life sentence. Eleven years later, DNA testing proved Cotton's innocence and identified the actual rapist—a man whose photograph had never been shown to her. Thompson was left with what she would later describe as suffocating, debilitating shame.

That guilt became the seed for something unprecedented. Over the decades, as DNA exonerations multiplied—more than 3,800 people freed so far—Thompson noticed a pattern that no one was addressing: the original crime victims were being forgotten. When an innocent person walked free from prison, the public celebrated. But the victims who had identified the wrong man faced a different nightmare entirely. They were blamed. Some were told they deserved prison themselves. They carried the weight of having sent an innocent person away while the real perpetrator remained at large or, worse, continued to harm others. In Thompson's own case, the man who actually raped her went on to commit six more first-degree rapes before he was finally caught.

Memory experts have long understood how eyewitnesses can be mistaken. When the actual perpetrator is absent from a lineup, witnesses often select someone else—and that wrong person then replaces the true offender in their memory. It is not a lie. It is not a false accusation. It is a failure of the system. Yet victims bore the shame as if it were their fault.

Thompson decided to do something no one else had attempted. In 2015, she founded Healing Justice, an organization dedicated to bringing together crime victims and exonerees from different cases for multi-day retreats. The goal was not to assign blame but to help both groups process the wounds left behind when the justice system gets it wrong. On a recent retreat in Virginia, ten people gathered: women who had been raped at ages 12 and 15; men who had spent more than two decades in prison for crimes they did not commit; family members of murder victims whose killers remained unknown. Raymond Towler had spent 29 years behind bars. Chris Ochoa had confessed to rape and murder under abusive interrogation. Howard Dudley had served more than 23 years after prosecutors withheld exonerating evidence. Tomeshia Carrington Artis, raped at 12, had carried guilt for decades. Loretta Zilinger-White, assaulted at 15, still could not erase the face of the man she had identified from her memory, even after DNA proved his innocence.

The retreat began with a metaphor. Thompson asked participants to smash bowls with hammers, then glue the pieces back together. It was easy to break, she noted. Repair was harder. She then introduced kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold. The broken places, she explained, do not make us disposable. They make us strong. Over three days, sitting in circles with a social worker present, the group shared their losses. Towler spoke of the trauma of incarceration, of watching men die by suicide or at the hands of police. Beerntsen described the hardest part: hearing what the exonerees had endured. Loretta spoke of being stuck—of reliving her assault daily, of feeling guilty even though DNA had cleared the man she identified. Andrea Harrison, whose mother was brutally murdered in 1987 when Andrea was three years old, had believed for years that Larry Peterson was her mother's killer. When DNA proved him innocent, she could not shake the image from her mind. The real killer was still out there. The case had gone cold. Her mother had become an afterthought.

Thompson led an exercise on the power of internalized criticism. She had participants write letters to themselves from their harshest inner voice—the voice that called them liars, rapists, failures. Loretta wrote: "You deserved to be raped and beaten. You really don't deserve to be alive." Raymond wrote: "You are an angry Black man. You will never know love. You will always be a prisoner." When they read these letters aloud, the room was heavy with pain. Then Thompson asked them to write again, this time from a voice of self-compassion—the voice they would use for someone they loved. The shift was visible. Faces softened. Smiles appeared. Raymond's second letter read: "You have a kind heart. You are loved. Your dreams have come true and you are free to dream more and create."

By the third day, the mood had transformed. The group played improv games, acted like animals, laughed. Over an art project, Raymond and Loretta had a conversation that neither had expected. She asked him if he blamed the victims. He told her: "You didn't do anything wrong. It's not your fault." Later, Loretta would say that in thirty years, she had finally let go of her guilt. When the retreat ended, they clasped hands and shared wishes for one another. Three of the exonerees have since married. Thompson continues to lead these retreats and advises prosecutors' offices across the country on how to support crime victims with empathy when exonerations occur. She says she will always be healing. But what sustains her, she notes, is the realization that while she is helping others, they are also helping her.