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John Thompson prepared his two sons and mother for his death seven times.
He also tried to reach out to anyone who could help stop it.
“I wrote Oprah Winfrey, Jenny Jones, Jenny Craig. I was trying anybody that was on the TV that looked like they had some popularity, I was trying to get with them, Geraldo, all of them,” he said. “And no one wanted to hear, you know.”
No one wanted to hear that Thompson, convicted in 1985 of murder and armed robbery, was innocent – the victim of a breathtaking degree of prosecutor misconduct.
“So I was dead,” he said. “There was nothing else nobody else could do.”
But Louisiana never ended up killing him. A private investigator, hired by Johnson’s attorneys, discovered evidence that could have proven Thompson’s innocence that was deliberately concealed by the New Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.
Previously hidden police reports showed witnesses at the scene describing the shooter as 6 feet tall with close-cropped hair. Thompson is 5 feet 8 inches tall and had an Afro. The prosecution also had a blood test of the man believed to be the perpetrator. It wasn't Thompson's, and it was never turned over at trial.
After 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row in the infamous State Penitentiary at Angola, Thompson received a new trial. He was acquitted in 35 minutes.
Thompson went on to win $14 million in a civil suit, after a jury found the district attorney’s office had failed to train prosecutors of their legal obligation to turn over evidence favorable to the defense.
But in 2011, a divided U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ruling, concluding that there was not enough evidence to prove that the office of District Attorney Harry Connick – father of actor and singer Harry Connick Jr. – was “deliberately indifferent.”
Reading her dissent from the bench, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at least five prosecutors in the office had hidden evidence, and that “long-concealed prosecutorial transgressions” were neither “isolated nor atypical.”
But still, the majority decided that the office could not be held liable – adding to a pile of state laws and precedents that give prosecutors an extremely high level of immunity from subsequent charges that they violated a defendant’s civil rights.
“Our United States Supreme Court told the rest of the district attorneys around the world, ‘Continue to do the good work because we not going to hold y'all accountable. I don't care how bad I catch y'all hand in the cookie jar,’” Thompson said.
“The fact is, people always allow district attorneys to get away with all this damage,” he added. “My whole family was destroyed.”
Neither the New Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office nor Harry Connick, now retired, responded to interview requests. The prosecutor who hid the blood evidence died in 1994.
Gary Clements
New Orleans attorney
Thompson’s case is hardly an isolated example of prosecutor misconduct. While there are few hard numbers across the country, there are data on the federal level. Between 2002 and 2013, the Department of Justice documented 48 allegations of federal attorneys misleading the courts, including 20 cases that were determined to be intentional, according to data obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. The DOJ also reported 29 allegations of federal prosecutors withholding evidence that would likely have proven the defendant’s innocence – with one case found to be intentional.
And last month, five men wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1989 beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park agreed to a $40 million settlement. The longstanding civil rights lawsuit hinged on the men’s claims that they were coerced into incriminating statements, as well as DNA evidence that was later uncovered.
Only about 2 percent of prosecutors ever face consequences for prosecutorial misconduct, according to Everett Bartlett, president of the Center for Prosecutor Integrity, a nonprofit group that supports so-called open-file policies, where defense attorneys can access all of the prosecution’s evidence. Several states have adopted the measure, he told Al Jazeera America earlier this month.
Dan Alonso, former chief assistant district attorney for Manhattan, argues that prosecutor misconduct represents a tiny fraction of cases.
“I want to make clear that we’re talking about an infinitesimally small percentage of cases in the system,” he said. “Intentional misconduct, particularly withholding exculpatory evidence is completely unacceptable, but it’s a vanishingly small number of cases.”
And he believes that increasing the liability of prosecutors would create more damage than it would prevent.
“You can’t have a society where the prosecutor is worried that if she loses a case she spends the next couple of years in a civil lawsuit,” he explained. “It’s a longstanding doctrine from common law, and the Supreme Court has applied it to the federal civil rights laws, where prosecutors have absolute immunity when acts done in the course of prosecuting cases.”
Gary Clements, director of the Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana, believes prosecutorial misconduct is a much bigger problem than a few bad apples. He said he has cases ongoing right now in which evidence has been hidden, changed or misrepresented to the point that what is told to the jury doesn’t reflect the truth of the crime.
“My personal belief: It’s a cowboy mentality,” he said. “And those people turn around and say, ‘Look what I did to make life better for you. I solved crimes. I am tough on crime. And I'm not here to coddle criminals.’”
As a free man, Thompson has kept up his fight.
“I could easily do like most of the other exonerees, come out here and just die and drown, pitiful, mad because nobody don't wanted to hear their voice, mad because they don't know how to create a voice for themself,” he said.
In 2008, he founded Resurrection After Exoneration, which offers housing, job training and other help to wrongfully convicted people who often have little money or support when they leave prison. The organization also seeks to educate the public about wrongful convictions.
“If we’re going to give that man that power to kill us, at least we should have the power to say, ‘If you do something wrong, you not going to get away with it. And right now, the United States Supreme Court said they can't do nothing wrong. Anything they do, they can get away with it,’” he said. “So I think that's the United States Supreme Court opinion. It shouldn't be ours.”
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