Former Death Row inmate seeks probe of Orleans Parish D.A.’s Office

8th August 2016   ·   0 Comments

Petition describes a ‘culture of hiding evidence and cheating’

Former Death Row inmate John Thompson, a wrongfully convicted man who spent 14 years on Death Row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for a murder he did not commit, on Tuesday filed a 29-page document asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the more than 100 cases filed by former Orleans Parish District Attorney James Williams between 1980 and 1990.

In the petition, Thompson alleges that Williams “grossly violated his duty, the power entrusted to him and the constitutional rights of countless defendants he prosecuted” between 1980 and 1990.

In his cover letter to the Department of Justice, Thompson recounted how he gathered with other wrongfully convicted residents four months ago and how they shared stories about how their constitutional rights were violated by the Orleans Parish D.A.’s Office.

“At that meeting, I told the all-too-true story of how a prosecutor in New Orleans, Jim Williams, tried to kill me by recklessly, arguably intentionally, abusing his awesome prosecutorial power to illegally seek my execution,” Thompson wrote. “One by one, courts have recognized that he has done the same to several other people here in New Orleans. To this day, however, his heinous abuses of power have not been addressed in any significant way. He just kept going. And unless a defendant or wrongfully convicted person was lucky enough to be about to prove his misdeeds to a court, the entire system acted as if there was nothing wrong, nothing more to be concerned about.

“This is shocking,” Thompson continued. “To my community, it is also terrifying. It is also, literally, torturous. For our government realizes that Jim Williams and others like him have run roughshod over our constitutional rights. And my community has come to believe that the government doesn’t care enough to try to defend us from such rampant and systemic prosecutorial misconduct.

“I refuse to believe that of my government. That is why I an filing this petition with you, the United States Department of Justice, to investigate and provide the relief and remedies that my community and I — and those like us across the country — deserve under law.

“When we suffer such violations of the law we are victims — but no one recognizes us as such because the perpetrators worked for the government. If you ask the family members of innocent people sentenced to death, you would hear the pain akin to that of original victims of crimes and their families.

“Whether the violations we suffer are at the hands of individuals or government actors, we are victims,” Thompson wrote.

In all, Thompson spent 18 years in jail, including the 14 years he spent on Death Row.

He was tried and convicted in 1985 for the murder of a New Orleans hotel executive and sentenced to die. He was days away from being executed when an investigator provided by Loyola University’s Capital Defense Project discovered evidence that had been withheld during Thompson’s trial. That evidence and the testimony of a prosecutor, led to Thompson’s exoneration in 2003.

In 2007 a Civil Court jury awarded him $14 million in damages — $1 million for every year spent on death row. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the decision but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed it in a 5-4 decision in 2011. Among those who testified at the Supreme Court hearing was Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, who told the high court that the City of New Orleans could not afford to pay the $14 million decision.

The Supreme Court ruling clearly left Thompson, who now runs a nonprofit group called Resurrection After Exoneration, feeling that justice had not been served in his case.

“Even though the record of the misconduct by (Orleans Parish D.A. Harry) Connick’s prosecutors in my case was clear, no one has done a thing about it or tried to bring them to justice,” Thompson wrote in last week’s letter to the DOJ. “I feel like the victim of an attempted murder where everyone knows who was responsible and no one has seen fit to hold them accountable. I can only assume it is because I was a poor Black man and they were white men and women, colleagues and friends of those who could hold them accountable.”

Thompson said he decided to ask the DOJ to intervene and investigate the Orleans Parish D.A.’s Office “because my life and that of my family matters…and no one in Louisiana will recognize that.”

He added that he is also petitioning the DOJ to investigate the D.A.’s Office because “Jim Williams was not alone.

“There was a culture of hiding evidence and cheating in the District Attorney’s Office in New Orleans that spread over several decades,” he wrote. “According to the National Registry of Exonerations, New Orleans has the highest per capita rate of proven wrongful convictions of any jurisdiction over 300,000 in the country. We have 10 times more proven wrongful convictions than the national average and we have that number even and although there has only been one DNA exoneration in New Orleans (because our clerk of court and police have lost and systematically destroyed biological evidence from closed cases that could have been tested and that which they did not lose or destroy was lost forever in the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina). The exonerations have not all been because of withholding favorable evidence but most were, and what’s more, there are many more findings of withholding of exculpatory evidence than in just those cases where someone was fully exonerated.

“From all of these cases, some of the same prosecutors’ names come up time and again and yet no one in authority has asked for an investigation or taken any action whatsoever to look into why this was tolerated, or even encouraged, for so long,” Thompson continued.

“I never withheld any favorable evidence in either of John Thompson’s cases that I prosecuted,” Williams, who now runs a Gretna-based private law firm, told Nola.com in a statement last week. “Nearly 20 years ago, I testified numerous times on that issue while it was being litigated in state and federal court. I was completely cleared of any wrongdoing.”

Thompson said he was dismayed by the fact that “many of the people who were prosecutors with Harry Connick’s District Attorney’s Office are now high up in the current D.A.’s administration or are judges at every level in New Orleans and other parishes and even went to work at the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, the agency responsible for regulating attorneys.

“Of the current 12 judges at criminal court in New Orleans, seven of them were prosecutors for Harry Connick’s office, the same office where prosecutors cheated over and over again,” Thompson wrote.

Thompson said that after Curtis Kyles, another death row inmate, was exonerated in the mid-1990s the D.A.’s Office continued to violate defendants’ Brady rights and were caught doing so at least seven times, including in the case of 16-year-old Shareef Cousin, who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die for a murder he didn’t commit in part because a witness statement was not shared with his defense counsel and several defense witnesses were allegedly hidden from Cousin’s lawyers by prosecutors.

Nola.com reported that the Orleans Parish D.A.’s Office declined to comment on the petition last week.

The newspaper also reported that a photo of then Orleans Parish assistant D.A. Jim Williams taken from an issue of Esquire magazine published in 1995 that was displayed at last week’s press conference at Resurrection After Exoneration shows Williams standing next to a mini-electric chair with photos of John Thompson and four other death row inmates Williams prosecuted.

Also on display at least week’s conference was a quote Williams gave to The Los Angeles Times in 2007 in which he recalled his days as a prosecutor and reportedly told the publication, “It got to the point where there was no thrill for me unless there was a chance for the death penalty.”

Emily Maw, who heads up Innocence Project New Orleans, pointed last week to a national data base that confirmed that New Orleans has the highest per capita rate of wrongful convictions and marveled that “no state entity has taken it upon themselves to identify that this is a problem,”

Loyola University constitutional law professor Andrea Armstrong said at last week’s press conference that the petition filed by Thompson was filed under the Law Enforcement Misconduct and said Thompson is seeking “accountability” and not “money.”

While the DOJ mulls over Thompson’s petition, a process that could take months, Thompson plans to address prosecutorial misconduct, wrongful convictions and other issues highlighted in his petition on a number of Louisiana college campuses including Loyola, Tulane and LSU.

“Make no mistake that there are scores of innocent men — mostly poor Black men — who are wrongly convicted and sentenced to live out their days in Angola prison because Harry Connick’s prosecutors didn’t care one inch about the rights of the poor of this city,” Thompson wrote. “And please make no mistake that the District Attorney of New Orleans today, Leon Cannizzaro, is absolutely one of the men who learned from Harry Connick’s prosecutors.

“The question is this,” Thompson concluded. “As a person almost wrongfully executed by a prosecutor serially involved in recklessly pursuing wrongful death sentences, if the U.S. Department of Justice is not willing to inquire as to whether action is needed to provide justice and prevent future injustice, then can people like me really expect justice under law in America?”

This article originally published in the August 8, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.