Former Death Row Inmate Will Talk about Prosecutorial Misconduct at King Hall This Week

This Thursday at King Hall, John Thompson, who spent 14 years on death row before he was exonerated one month before his scheduled execution, based on the prosecution’s withholding of exculpatory evidence during trial, will speak at King Hall and discuss his experiences with the criminal justice system.

That decision, handed down by Justice Clarence Thomas, who ruled that the district attorney cannot be held responsible for the single act of a lone prosecutor, has been called one of the cruelest Supreme Court decisions ever.

In an April 2011 Op-Ed penned by John Thompson himself, he describes his 1985 arrest in New Orleans.

“I remember the police coming to my grandmother’s house – we all knew it was the cops because of how hard they banged on the door before kicking it in. My grandmother and my mom were there, along with my little brother and sister, my two sons – John Jr., 4, and Dedric, 6 – my girlfriend and me. The officers had guns drawn and were yelling. I guess they thought they were coming for a murderer. All the children were scared and crying. I was 22.”

He continued, “They took me to the homicide division, and played a cassette tape on which a man I knew named Kevin Freeman accused me of shooting a man. He had also been arrested as a suspect in the murder. A few weeks earlier he had sold me a ring and a gun; it turned out that the ring belonged to the victim and the gun was the murder weapon.

“My picture was on the news, and a man called in to report that I looked like someone who had recently tried to rob his children. Suddenly I was accused of that crime, too. I was tried for the robbery first. My lawyers never knew there was blood evidence at the scene, and I was convicted based on the victims’ identification.

“After that, my lawyers thought it was best if I didn’t testify at the murder trial,” he said. “So I never defended myself, or got to explain that I got the ring and the gun from Kevin Freeman. And now that I officially had a history of violent crime because of the robbery conviction, the prosecutors used it to get the death penalty.”

Eventually both of those convictions would be overturned.  Several weeks before he was scheduled to be executed in 1999, Mr. Thompson’s private investigators discovered evidence that the prosecutors had failed to turn over exculpatory evidence that would have cleared him of his robbery charge.

The strongest evidence was that the blood sample at the crime scene did not match Mr. Thompson’s blood type.  It is worse than that, because this was known to the prosecutors 14 years before and excluded Mr. Thompson as the perpetrator.  But it gets even worse than that, because in order to make sure the defense did not find out about this evidence, the assistant DA who was prosecuting the case took the jeans from the police evidence locker and threw them away.

Mr. Thompson explained that that was not all, “The investigator later found the names of witnesses and police reports from the murder case that hadn’t been turned over either.

“As a result, the armed robbery conviction was thrown out in 1999, and I was taken off death row. Then, in 2002, my murder conviction was thrown out. At a retrial the following year, the jury took only 35 minutes to acquit me,” he wrote.

The prosecutors involved in Mr. Thompson’s cases covered up 10 separate pieces of evidence and, amazingly, as he wrote, “most of them are still able to practice law today.”

That may change, and the most ironic part is that the agent may be the same Supreme Court that denied Mr. Thompson justice in March.

As the New York Times reported earlier this week, Donna R. Andrieu, an assistant district attorney in New Orleans, was forced to defend her office’s efforts to withhold evidence from a criminal defendant.

Wrote the New York Times, “Justice [Elena] Kagan said she could not understand why the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office persisted in defending its conduct.”

“Did your office ever consider just confessing error in this case?” she asked.

“There have been serious accusations against the practices of your office, not yours in particular, but prior ones,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. “It is disconcerting to me that when I asked you the question directly, should this material have been turned over, you gave an absolute no.

“That’s really troubling,” Justice Sotomayor added.

It was not just the more liberal justices who were concerned this time, either.

The issue involved another case, Juan Smith from 1995, who was convicted of mass murder based solely on the testimony of a single eyewitness with no DNA, fingerprint, weapons or other physical evidence.

Wrote the Times: “Unknown to Mr. Smith’s lawyers, Mr. Boatner had said conflicting things in interviews with the police. Just after the shootings, he said he could not describe the intruders except to say they were black men. A few hours later, he mentioned ‘a black male with a low cut, gold in his mouth,’ a description that matched Mr. Smith and five other suspects.”

However, “Five days later, Mr. Boatner told a police officer that he had not seen the intruders’ faces and could not identify them.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said, “If you were the defense lawyer, you really would like to have that statement where he said: ‘I couldn’t identify them.'”

Justice Antonin Scalia said of the evidence, “Of course it should have been turned over.”

And think about how close Mr. Thompson came to being executed, perhaps two or three weeks before his investigators happened to find hidden evidence.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

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