In the summer of 1984, a student named Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint in her apartment. It was early in the morning. She was twenty-two years old, and attended Elon College, in Burlington, North Carolina. After the attack, she managed to escape to a neighbor’s house. But before daybreak, the assailant had invaded another home and had raped another woman.

Ronald Cotton recalls seeing the composite sketch in the newspaper. “It had been all over the news,” he writes. “Two white girls got raped in the same night. ‘Man,’ I recalled saying to [my brother] Calvin. ‘When they get him, he’s done.’”

On August 1 of that same summer, Cotton heard that the police were looking for him. A week after that, Jennifer, whom he’d never seen before, picked him out of a lineup of seven men. She felt certain that he was the perpetrator. Cotton was charged with first-degree rape, burglary, and sexual offense.

Like Jennifer Thompson, Cotton was twenty-two years old. He came from a big, loving family in Burlington. He was working as a busboy at a seafood restaurant at the time and trying to get his life together. Earlier that year, he’d gotten out of prison for breaking and entering, and at sixteen he was arrested for breaking and entering with intent to commit rape. He had been out drinking, he says, when he snuck into to the home of a girl he’d been seeing and got into bed with her. She yelled, and her mother burst in with a shotgun. He was a kid, but his court-appointed attorney told him he was looking at fifty to ninety-five years, and encouraged him to plead out.

After the rape, Jennifer had trouble sleeping. Her relationship with her boyfriend broke down. She writes that at least once a week, she called the police in a panic to report an intruder who wasn’t there. Ronald’s was the face that haunted her, and she was determined to see him put away. “The police officers and the prosecutors told me I was the ‘best witness’ they ever put on the stand,” she later reflected. “I was ‘textbook.’” Ronald was sentenced to life in prison plus fifty years. Just months later, at Central Prison in Raleigh, he met Bobby Poole. Cotton eventually learned that Poole was the man who had committed the crimes Cotton had been convicted of.

Almost three years after his original conviction, Ronald was retried—by an all-white jury—for the rape of both Jennifer and the second woman. Despite statements that Poole had confessed to a fellow inmate, and that his blood type, not Ronald’s, had been found at one of the crime scenes, the...