An Innocent Man Who Imagined the World as It Should Be

In the end, John Thompson got to live 14 years as a free man — the same number he spent on Louisiana’s death row, condemned for a 1984 murder he didn’t commit.

Seven times the state set a date for his execution. Weeks before the seventh, in 1999, a private investigator hired by his lawyers discovered a crime-lab report that prosecutors had hidden from the defense, and that led eventually to Mr. Thompson’s exoneration in 2003.

Some exonerees are so relieved to be out of prison that they never look back. That was not Mr. Thompson. After his release (the jury at his retrial acquitted him in 35 minutes), Mr. Thompson set out to hold to account the prosecutors and other officials who had fought for so long to kill him.

“He was angry,” said Ben Cohen, a lawyer who worked with Mr. Thompson on criminal-justice issues, and became his friend. “All these things that we’re taught to accommodate as we become lawyers, he would not accommodate.”

Mr. Thompson sued the New Orleans district attorney’s office for failing to train prosecutors about their constitutional obligations to turn over exculpatory evidence. The jury awarded him $14 million, one of the largest-ever verdicts in a wrongful-conviction case. He never saw a dime of it.

In an exceptionally cruel and disingenuous ruling, the Supreme Court threw out Mr. Thompson’s award in 2011, by a 5-to-4 vote. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said Mr. Thompson had not shown that the misconduct in his case was caused by a failure to train, or that there was a pattern of such misconduct.

This was, to put it kindly, bunk. Under the 30-year reign of District Attorney Harry Connick, ignoring the Constitution to help win convictions was “standard operating procedure,” as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a stinging dissent. In Mr. Thompson’s case, “no fewer than five prosecutors” were involved in hiding evidence or knew about it, she wrote, yet all declined “despite multiple opportunities, spanning nearly two decades, to set the record straight.”

Last month, the lawyer who represented Mr. Connick’s office before the Supreme Court, Kyle Duncan, was nominated by President Trump to a judgeship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Assuming Mr. Duncan gets confirmed, at least Mr. Thompson won’t have to endure the insult of reading about it.

He died on Tuesday of a heart attack. He was 55.

In an op-ed article for this newspaper after the Supreme Court overturned his award, Mr. Thompson wrote, “I don’t care about the money.” He cared about punishing the prosecutors who had wronged him and many others. “Of the six men one of my prosecutors got sentenced to death, five eventually had their convictions reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct,” he wrote. And then there were the 4,000 inmates serving life without parole at Angola prison, where he had been locked up, but who had no access to a lawyer. How many, he wondered, had also been framed?

The plight of other inmates — most of whom had, like him, grown up poor and black — became a driving force of his life.

In 2007, Mr. Thompson, known to friends and colleagues as J.T., started Resurrection After Exoneration, a residential and educational program for people leaving prison the same way they went in — without money, family or friends to help them. With a few small donations, he bought and fixed up a run-down building on the gritty edge of the French Quarter, where tourist hordes fade quickly into the Tremé neighborhood. It was a stable, supportive environment for men with little experience of either — a place where people were treated as though their lives mattered, even when all their experiences with the criminal justice system had taught them the opposite.

When beds were full, Mr. Thompson made room on the floor at his house. He offered computer classes to people who’d never seen a cellphone; he answered emergency calls at 2 a.m.; and he picked men up off the bathroom floor after overdoses. After a heart attack in 2008, he returned to work within a week.

Even as he helped others move toward their future, he refused to let go of his own past, and his pursuit of the prosecutors who won his conviction and death sentence by cheating and subterfuge. They were the criminals, as he saw it — particularly Jim Williams, the assistant district attorney in charge of his case who knew even before trial that Mr. Thompson was innocent.

“He’d walk me through the elements of kidnapping and attempted murder and cross-examine me on why Jim Williams wasn’t guilty,” Mr. Cohen said. “He understood when I said that it doesn’t work that way, but I was describing the way the world is. He was describing the way it should be.”

In October 2016, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Thompson filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging civil-rights violations by Mr. Williams and the New Orleans district attorney’s office. The department has not yet responded.

Mr. Thompson long ago learned to adapt to the stresses of his life, inside prison and out, but he could never escape them entirely. “Being on death row took its toll,” Mr. Cohen said. “J.T. was in pain. He would call me and yell, sometimes at me, sometimes just at the world. I think a lot of us turn off the pain or live in comfort, and he did neither.”

John Thompson may have been 55 when he died, but his heart was far older.

Source: The New York Times, Opinion, October 5, 2017

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