An Innocent Man Who Imagined the World as It Should Be - The New York Times

"In the end, John Thompson got to live 14 years as a free man — the same number he spent on Louisiana’s death row, condemned for a 1984 murder he didn’t commit.



Seven times the state set a date for his execution. Weeks before the seventh, in 1999, a private investigator hired by his lawyers discovered a crime-lab report that prosecutors had hidden from the defense, and that led eventually to Mr. Thompson’s exoneration in 2003.



Some exonerees are so relieved to be out of prison that they never look back. That was not Mr. Thompson. After his release (the jury at his retrial acquitted him in 35 minutes), Mr. Thompson set out to hold to account the prosecutors and other officials who had fought for so long to kill him.



“He was angry,” said Ben Cohen, a lawyer who worked with Mr. Thompson on criminal-justice issues, and became his friend. “All these things that we’re taught to accommodate as we become lawyers, he would not accommodate.”



Mr. Thompson sued the New Orleans district attorney’s office for failing to train prosecutors about their constitutional obligations to turn over exculpatory evidence. The jury awarded him $14 million, one of the largest-ever verdicts in a wrongful-conviction case. He never saw a dime of it.



In an exceptionally cruel and disingenuous ruling, the Supreme Court threw out Mr. Thompson’s award in 2011, by a 5-to-4 vote. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said Mr. Thompson had not shown that the misconduct in his case was caused by a failure to train, or that there was a pattern of such misconduct.



This was, to put it kindly, bunk. Under the 30-year reign of District Attorney Harry Connick, ignoring the Constitution to help win convictions was “standard operating procedure,” as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a stinging dissent. In Mr. Thompson’s case, “no fewer than five prosecutors” were involved in hiding evidence or knew about it, she wrote, yet all declined “despite multiple opportunities, spanning nearly two decades, to set the record straight.”



Last month, the lawyer who represented Mr. Connick’s office before the Supreme Court, Kyle Duncan, was nominated by President Trump to a judgeship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Assuming Mr. Duncan gets confirmed, at least Mr. Thompson won’t have to endure the insult of reading about it.



He died on Tuesday of a heart attack. He was 55."



An Innocent Man Who Imagined the World as It Should Be - The New York Times