The Supreme Court ruling overturning John Thompson's award was a 2011 decision that nullified a jury’s $14 million award to a man whose conviction and death sentence had been overturned after evidence contradicting the State’s case came to light. Its significance lay in the distance between the misconduct the jury had found and the remedy the courts would permit: Thompson had been acquitted and released, but the Supreme Court held that the prosecutor could not be made to pay damages for intentionally suppressing evidence of innocence.

The evidence that changed Thompson’s case

A month before John Thompson was scheduled to be executed in Louisiana, a crime-lab report was uncovered that contradicted the State’s case against him in a robbery-murder from fourteen years earlier. State courts overturned both his conviction and death sentence; he was later acquitted of all charges and released. The report’s discovery therefore altered more than the case’s evidentiary picture: it came close to the scheduled execution of a man who had not committed the crime.

After his release, Thompson brought 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 allowed him to spend fourteen years in prison for a crime he had not committed. The verdict translated the jury’s finding of serious wrongdoing into a concrete award for the years Thompson had lost.

The Supreme Court’s reversal

Connick appealed the judgment, and in 2011 the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the 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 if the prosecutor had intentionally and illegally withheld evidence of innocence. The ruling thus displaced the jury’s award without undoing the account of Thompson’s wrongful imprisonment described in the case.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a dissent. The decision was strongly criticized by scholars and Court observers, but the practical result for Thompson was stark: he received none of the $14 million. The reversal made prosecutorial immunity not an abstract procedural obstacle but a decisive limit on compensation after a wrongful conviction.

Relevance to Walter McMillian’s civil case

The ruling framed a similar obstacle in Bryan Stevenson’s efforts on behalf of Walter McMillian. Stevenson’s account notes that the prosecutor who tried McMillian, Ted Pearson, had illegally withheld evidence that directly resulted in McMillian’s wrongful conviction. Yet the protections afforded to prosecutors and judges made a civil action against Pearson unlikely to succeed, despite his central role in the prosecution.

McMillian’s civil case also involved nearly a dozen state and local officials and agencies. Most defendants eventually settled after a year of depositions, hearings, and pretrial litigation, providing McMillian a few hundred thousand dollars. The unresolved claim against Monroe County concerned Sheriff Tate’s misconduct and turned on whether the sheriff was a county or state employee; it was a distinct immunity question. The Thompson ruling nevertheless underscored the broader difficulty Stevenson describes: a finding that government misconduct helped send an innocent person to prison did not ensure that the responsible official—or the institution behind him—could be held financially accountable.