John Thompson

John Thompson’s case exposes a stark divide between correcting a wrongful conviction and providing a remedy for the misconduct that helped produce it. A crime-lab report undermined the State’s case shortly before his scheduled execution; state courts overturned his conviction and death sentence, and he was acquitted and released. Yet after a jury found that the district attorney had illegally suppressed evidence of his innocence, the United States Supreme Court overturned the resulting award, leaving Thompson without compensation.

The Report and Thompson’s Release

A month before Thompson was scheduled to be executed in Louisiana, a crime-lab report was uncovered that contradicted the State’s case against him for a robbery-murder committed fourteen years earlier. The report altered the course of a prosecution that had kept him in prison for a crime he had not committed. State courts overturned both his conviction and death sentence, and Thompson was subsequently acquitted of all charges and released.

The account presents this reversal as the discovery of evidence that should have mattered earlier, not as a new accusation against Thompson. Its timing—just weeks before his execution—makes the failure of disclosure especially consequential: the report emerged only after he had spent fourteen years imprisoned and when the State was close to carrying out his sentence.

Civil Suit and the Jury’s Finding

After his release, Thompson filed a civil suit. A New Orleans jury awarded him $14 million, finding that District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. had illegally suppressed evidence of Thompson’s innocence and had allowed him to spend fourteen years in prison for a crime he had not committed. The verdict thus addressed not only the lost years but the conduct of the prosecutor whose office had withheld evidence that contradicted the State’s case.

The award offered a possible form of accountability after the criminal courts had corrected the conviction. But Connick appealed, turning the dispute from the facts of Thompson’s imprisonment to the legal limits on holding a prosecutor responsible for misconduct in a criminal case.

The Supreme Court’s Reversal

In 2011, the United States Supreme Court overturned the $14 million award in a closely divided 5–4 decision. The Court held that a prosecutor could not be held liable for misconduct in a criminal case even when the prosecutor had intentionally and illegally withheld evidence of innocence. Thompson therefore received no money from the jury’s judgment.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a dissent, and the decision drew strong criticism from scholars and Court observers. In the book’s account, Thompson’s case demonstrates that exoneration and accountability are separate outcomes: the courts could set aside his conviction and release him, while the civil ruling still denied him compensation for the prosecutor’s suppression of evidence.