It is, quite plainly, a miscarriage of justice: John Thompson spent 14 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Now, a bitterly divided Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the prosecutor who kept him on death row by suppressing DNA evidence that could have exonerated Thompson. The Court’s 5-4 decision means that John Thompson will not see a dime of the $14 million in damages awarded to him by a New Orleans jury.
On December 6, 1984, an assailant shot and killed Raymond T. Liuzza, Jr., the son of a prominent New Orleans business executive (Ginsberg.) An earlier DLO article details Thompson’s agonizing years on death row, his attorney’s unrelenting fight for justice and a last-second blood test that exonerated him.
A month before Thompson was to be executed, his lawyer hired a private investigator. What the P.I. found was simply stunning: a microfiche of a blood test buried in the DA’s office indicating that Liuzza’s murderer had type B blood.
Thompson’s attorney sent him a letter in prison. The letter instructed Thompson to prick his finger with the staple, drop blood on the letter and send it back. Lab tests reveled John Thompson was blood type O. He was now on the path to being a free man.
In addition to DNA evidence, a 1999 retrial of Thompson’s case revealed that the court repeatedly suppressed eyewitness evidence that pointed to a suspect who was “African-American, six-feet tall, with close cut hair.” This physical description did not match Thompson, who was 5-foot-8 with an Afro.
The New Orleans jury exonerated Thompson and, in 2003, he sued the DA’s office for the amount of $14 million. Thompson’s attorneys held that his Constitutional right to due process had been violated under Brady v. Maryland (1963.)
The Brady statute holds that the prosecution must disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense. A New Orleans jury awarded Thompson $14 million and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifith Circuit upheld the verdict. However, Connick appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court, and there it met a different fate.
On March 29, 2011, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the Court’s decision: Harry Connick Sr., then-district attorney of New Orleans, was not guilty of prosecutorial misconduct. The court found that the suppression of exculpating evidence did not prove “deliberate indifference” with respect to Thompson’s constitutional right to due process.
In a show of strong disapproval, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg read her dissenting opinion aloud in the Court. Ginsberg claimed that the court was shielding a city and its prosecutors from “flagrant” misconduct that nearly cost an innocent man his life.
“John Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them isolated on death row, before the truth came to light,” said Justice Ginsberg, who was joined by Justice Breyer, Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan in writing the Court’s dissent (Ginsberg, et al.)
However, four Justices are not enough to prevent a decision because the court rules by strict majority: The remaining justices—Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Alito—joined Clarence Roberts in issuing the majority opinion.
The majority opinion claimed that the oversight was an aberration, a one-time mistake. In oral arguments before the Court, Justice Scalia said that it would be unfair to punish an entire DA’s office for the misconduct of one prosecutor. However, according to LA Times reporter David Savage (to whom this article is much indebted,) at least four prosecutors knew about the hidden blood test. Moreover, Thompson’s attorney’s showed evidence of other, similar cases in New Orleans where key evidence was concealed from defense lawyers.
Indeed, the dissent argues that the suppression of evidence was not an aberration, but rather “the conceded, long concealed prosecutorial transgressions were neither isolated nor atypical.” The dissent argues that Connick’s DA’s office continually and systematically suppressed evidence that would have exonerated Thompson (Ginsberg.)
“[Thompson] was innocent of the charge of attempted armed robbery, and his subsequent trial on a murder charge, by prosecutorial design, was fundamentally unfair,” Ginsberg wrote.
“Fundamentally unfair,” is perhaps the best way to describe the way the Justice system dealt with John Thompson. He spent 18 years behind bars, missing out on the childhood of his kid and the prime of his life.
In a very moving op-ed piece in the New York Times, Thompson himself writes that he doesn’t care about the money. What he wants to know is why his prosecutors are not in jail themselves.
“There were no ethics charges against them, no criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court no one can be sued.” Thompson goes on to say, “If a private investigator hired by a generous law firm hadn’t found the blood evidence, I’d be dead today. No doubt about it.”
Last month, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed off on a bill banning the death penalty in Illinois. Prior to that, the state had enforced a 10-year moratorium on capital punishment. Still, many Illinois prisoners remain imprisoned by sentences of life without parole. And while many of those convicted are guilty, we must as a society keep in mind that there are innocent people convicted of crimes in this nation and that the legal system is far from perfect. However, a more perfect justice system should be the goal of everyone in the legal profession.
With that in mind, we readily acknowledge that there is the moral hazard of prosecutorial intimidation from lawsuits, but is this hazard greater than the current message the court is sending by protecting its own while an innocent man rots in prison? As Chief Justice Warren Burger once said, “A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of a ordered liberty for a free people.” Thompson’s case undermines our confidence in the court system, and that is the most dangerous hazard of all.
Please don’t be silent about wrongful convictions. Contact Dolan Legal for your free consultation.
–Steven Flores
Sources Cited and Consulted
Ginsberg, Ruth Bader. Thompson v. Connick, dissenting opinion. Retrieved 16 April, 2011
Savage, David. “Supreme Court rejects damages for innocent man who spent 14 years n death row.” The Los Angeles Times. 30 March, 2011
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