Scott Lemieux writes about the injustice served by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court in the case of John Thompson, who spent almost 20 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit.
But the injustice didn't end there. Earlier this week, a bare majority of the Supreme Court threw out the jury award. Speaking through Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court's five Republican appointees held that New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. was not legally liable for the criminal actions of the prosecutors under his supervision. According to Thomas, Thompson did not "prove a pattern of similar violations" that would make the D.A.'s office responsible for illegally suppressing exculpatory evidence.
As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's closely argued dissent pointed out, there was an obvious long-running pattern of misbehavior. The violations of Thompson's rights, she writes, "were not singular and they were not aberrational"; They resulted from prosecutorial misconduct over a nearly 20-year period. If this doesn't constitute a pattern for which the D.A. can be responsible, it's unclear what would, particularly given how hard it is to uncover evidence of Brady violations. The jury also had other reasons for finding that Connick was "deliberately indifferent" to whether the prosecutors in his office followed Brady. Connick and other senior prosecutors were unable even to correctly articulate what the Brady decision requires of prosecutors, nor did prosecutors in the office receive training explaining them. Despite all this, the conservative wing of the Court elected to compound the injustices inflicted on Thompson by throwing out the jury verdict.
As Radley Balko already pointed out, this is the type of verdict that removes one of the strongest incentives for a prosecutor not to commit misconduct.
But Thomas' ruling also includes a really silly argument: Because lawyers are supposed to have the legal training to know not to withhold evidence, the local government can't be held responsible for failing to teach them that. With qualified immunity shielding the prosecutors from being sued in the process of performing their official duties, Thomas uses a "personal responsibility" argument to shield anyone from being held personally responsible for wrongly stealing 20 years of a man's life. This ruling makes it more likely it will happen again.
