Cops Are Stupid, But Prosecutors Are Smart

That's the message from the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 decision vacating a $15 million dollar jury award for John Thompson, a Louisiana man who spent 14 years on death row (in all, 18 years in prison) for back-to-back armed robbery and murder convictions. He was weeks away from being executed, until his investigator found blood evidence on the robbery victim's clothing that proved Thompson's innocence (he was Type O, but the blood evidence was Type B) that had been hidden from Thompson's lawyer by a team of prosecutors in the New Orleans Parrish District Attorney's Office, and ultimately led to his murder conviction. As one of these rogue prosecutors had stated to Thompson: "I'm going to fry you. You will die in the electric chair."

This grisly, almost unimaginable story of U.S. criminal justice gone amok, was closed by the Supreme Court this week in a decision by Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Kennedy, that has to rank as one of the Court's most questionable opinions in the area. Thompson, in his civil rights lawsuit after his exoneration, claimed that New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr. at the time was "deliberately indifferent" to the constitutional rights of defendants prosecuted by his office - one of the prosecutors actually "confessed" to another having allegedly suppressed the exculpatory blood evidence - and, in fact, knowingly allowed prosecutors in his office to engage in repeated acts of misconduct, especially hiding exculpatory evidence, without any adverse consequences to them. Critical to Thompson's argument, which the jury, as well as two lower federal courts, found persuasive, was proof that Connick willfully failed to train his prosecutors about how to handle exculpatory evidence. Connick's office, the civil jury learned, had one of the worst records in the country in mishandling such evidence. Connick astonishingly claimed in his own testimony that training would make his job more difficult.

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