Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is presented through a single consequential role: as a Supreme Court justice who wrote a compelling dissent against a ruling that left John Thompson without compensation after a prosecutor’s suppression of evidence had helped keep him imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. Her appearance places a dissenting judicial voice against a legal rule that, in the book’s account, protects prosecutors from accountability even for intentional misconduct.

Identity and Introduction

The book identifies Ginsburg as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. It does not develop her personal history or broader judicial career; instead, it introduces her in the aftermath of a 2011 decision concerning prosecutorial misconduct and civil liability. Her significance here is attached to the dissent she wrote in that case.

The Thompson Case

A month before John Thompson was scheduled to be executed in Louisiana, a crime-lab report surfaced that contradicted the State’s case against him in a robbery-murder from fourteen years earlier. State courts overturned his conviction and death sentence, and he was later acquitted and released. Thompson then brought a civil suit, and a New Orleans jury awarded him $14 million after finding that District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. had illegally suppressed evidence of his innocence and allowed him to remain imprisoned for fourteen years for a crime he had not committed.

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

Dissent and Significance

Ginsburg wrote a compelling dissent in opposition to the Court’s decision. The account does not reproduce her arguments in detail, but places her dissent alongside the sharply criticized ruling and the concrete result for Thompson: despite his exoneration and release, the civil award was taken away. Her role in this episode is therefore both judicial and narrative—the dissent registers resistance within the Court while underscoring how a rule of immunity could leave a person harmed by official misconduct without compensation.