The fellow Harry Connick Sr.’s office framed for murder has an editorial in the NYT about his experience.
The prosecutors involved in my two cases, from the office of the Orleans Parish district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., helped to cover up 10 separate pieces of evidence. And most of them are still able to practice law today.
Why weren’t they punished for what they did? When the hidden evidence first surfaced, Mr. Connick announced that his office would hold a grand jury investigation. But once it became clear how many people had been involved, he called it off.
In 2005, I sued the prosecutors and the district attorney’s office for what they did to me. The jurors heard testimony from the special prosecutor who had been assigned by Mr. Connick’s office to the canceled investigation, who told them, “We should have indicted these guys, but they didn’t and it was wrong.” The jury awarded me $14 million in damages — $1 million for every year on death row — which would have been paid by the district attorney’s office. That jury verdict is what the Supreme Court has just overturned.
I don’t care about the money. I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn’t do and nearly had me killed are not in jail themselves. There were no ethics charges against them, no criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court, no one can be sued.
This can’t just be the cost of doing business. These lawyers need to be held accountable. Of course, accountability for those in power is something folks like Scalia and Thomas think of as “bad,” and so they reversed the lower courts’ decisions.
I’d like to see a legal remedy to punish these kinds of outrageous abuses as well.
The trick is making sure that we don’t open the door for ACLU/SPLC types to counter-prosecute every minority conviction as a racist hate crime, which is the far left wet dream that lies shallowly concealed beneath the surface of the argument built on Thompson’s horrifying tale- the redress of which no sane, decent person could ever object. That’s usually how these rhetorical games work.