$14 Million Jury Award to Ex-Inmate Is Dismissed
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a $14 million jury award in favor of a former death row inmate who was freed after prosecutorial misconduct came to light.
The 5-to-4 decision divided along the court’s ideological fault line and prompted the first dissent read from the bench this term, from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The former inmate, John Thompson, had sued Harry F. Connick, a former district attorney in New Orleans, saying his office had not trained prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence. Prosecutors in the office had failed to give Mr. Thompson’s lawyers a report showing that blood at a crime scene was not his.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said that only a pattern of misconduct would warrant holding Mr. Connick accountable for what happened on his watch.
Mr. Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row. “I was delivered an execution warrant in my cell seven times,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. “I was only weeks from being executed when my lawyers got the killing stopped.”
The blood evidence would have proved Mr. Thompson innocent of a 1984 armed robbery. Soon after he was convicted on that charge, prosecutors tried him for an unrelated murder. After the failure to turn over the blood evidence came to light in 1999, prosecutors dismissed the armed robbery charges. A state appeals court later reversed the murder conviction, reasoning that Mr. Thompson’s armed robbery conviction had dissuaded him from testifying in his own defense in the murder case. In 2003, Mr. Thompson was retried for the murder and found not guilty.
“The role of a prosecutor,” Justice Thomas wrote, “is to see that justice is done.”
“By their own admission,” he continued, “the prosecutors who tried Thompson’s armed robbery case failed to carry out this responsibility. But the only issue before us is whether Connick, as the policy maker for the district attorney’s office, was deliberately indifferent to the need to train the attorneys under his authority.”
The answer to that question was no, Justice Thomas wrote, given what he said was an absence of proof concerning a pattern of misconduct.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Justice Thomas’s opinion.
Justice Scalia, in a concurrence joined by Justice Alito, said the misconduct in the case was the work of a single “miscreant prosecutor,” Gerry Deegan, who suppressed evidence “he believed to be exculpatory, in an effort to railroad Thompson.” No amount of training, Justice Scalia wrote, would have countered such willful wrongdoing.
In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg wrote that “no fewer than five prosecutors” were complicit in a violation of Mr. Thompson’s constitutional rights. “They kept from him, year upon year, evidence vital to his defense.”
The prosecutors’ conduct, Justice Ginsburg wrote, “was a foreseeable consequence of lax training.” Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the dissent.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Leon A. Cannizzaro Jr., the current district attorney in New Orleans, expressed relief over not having to pay a judgment that with interest was approaching $20 million, more than his office’s annual budget. He said his office “should not be held financially responsible for the intentional, unethical and illegal acts of a rogue prosecutor.”
Mr. Thompson expressed frustration about the Supreme Court’s ruling in his case, Connick v. Thompson, No. 09-571.
“If I’d spilled hot coffee on myself, I could have sued the person who served me the coffee,” he said. “But I can’t sue the prosecutors who nearly murdered me.”
The 5-to-4 decision divided along the court’s ideological fault line and prompted the first dissent read from the bench this term, from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The former inmate, John Thompson, had sued Harry F. Connick, a former district attorney in New Orleans, saying his office had not trained prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence. Prosecutors in the office had failed to give Mr. Thompson’s lawyers a report showing that blood at a crime scene was not his.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said that only a pattern of misconduct would warrant holding Mr. Connick accountable for what happened on his watch.
Mr. Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row. “I was delivered an execution warrant in my cell seven times,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. “I was only weeks from being executed when my lawyers got the killing stopped.”
The blood evidence would have proved Mr. Thompson innocent of a 1984 armed robbery. Soon after he was convicted on that charge, prosecutors tried him for an unrelated murder. After the failure to turn over the blood evidence came to light in 1999, prosecutors dismissed the armed robbery charges. A state appeals court later reversed the murder conviction, reasoning that Mr. Thompson’s armed robbery conviction had dissuaded him from testifying in his own defense in the murder case. In 2003, Mr. Thompson was retried for the murder and found not guilty.
“The role of a prosecutor,” Justice Thomas wrote, “is to see that justice is done.”
“By their own admission,” he continued, “the prosecutors who tried Thompson’s armed robbery case failed to carry out this responsibility. But the only issue before us is whether Connick, as the policy maker for the district attorney’s office, was deliberately indifferent to the need to train the attorneys under his authority.”
The answer to that question was no, Justice Thomas wrote, given what he said was an absence of proof concerning a pattern of misconduct.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Justice Thomas’s opinion.
Justice Scalia, in a concurrence joined by Justice Alito, said the misconduct in the case was the work of a single “miscreant prosecutor,” Gerry Deegan, who suppressed evidence “he believed to be exculpatory, in an effort to railroad Thompson.” No amount of training, Justice Scalia wrote, would have countered such willful wrongdoing.
In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg wrote that “no fewer than five prosecutors” were complicit in a violation of Mr. Thompson’s constitutional rights. “They kept from him, year upon year, evidence vital to his defense.”
The prosecutors’ conduct, Justice Ginsburg wrote, “was a foreseeable consequence of lax training.” Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the dissent.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Leon A. Cannizzaro Jr., the current district attorney in New Orleans, expressed relief over not having to pay a judgment that with interest was approaching $20 million, more than his office’s annual budget. He said his office “should not be held financially responsible for the intentional, unethical and illegal acts of a rogue prosecutor.”
Mr. Thompson expressed frustration about the Supreme Court’s ruling in his case, Connick v. Thompson, No. 09-571.
“If I’d spilled hot coffee on myself, I could have sued the person who served me the coffee,” he said. “But I can’t sue the prosecutors who nearly murdered me.”
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