The Supreme Court Stands Tall for Misbehaving Prosecutors by Scott Horton [View All]

[Jefferson23]

* Another damaging decision, 5 to 4 pushes accountability out the door for prosecutors, even when a man's life hangs
in the balance. The compensation awarded has now been overturned by the usual suspects on the SCOTUS. Worth reading is
Ginsburg take on the decision.


Can prosecutors press a criminal case against a man by suppressing the existence of forensic evidence that shows him to be innocent, without themselves being held accountable? “Yes,” says the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision (PDF), in a ruling by Justice Clarence Thomas. It’s a complicated story, but the core issue is fairly straightforward: prosecutorial accountability for serious misconduct—in this case, misconduct that put an innocent man on death row, and at one point within days of execution.

In 1985, John Thompson was arrested and charged with two separate crimes: a murder and an attempted armed robbery that took place three weeks later in New Orleans. Prosecutors opted for two separate trials, beginning with the robbery. Their thinking was likely tactical. If they got a conviction at the robbery trial, they could use that conviction against him at the murder trial, improving their chances at obtaining a conviction.

Two days before Thompson’s robbery trial was slated to begin, however, the prosecutor handling the case got a crime lab report showing that the perpetrator had left blood behind at the scene, and the blood was not Thompson’s. The law required the prosecutor to turn this report over to Thompson’s attorneys. Instead, he suppressed it and pressed forward with his case. The jury found Thompson guilty of the robbery. That conviction had a decisive impact on the second trial, too. Thompson was warned that if he testified in his own defense, the prosecution would be entitled to inform the jury of the robbery conviction and argue that he was not a truthful or reliable witness. Thompson therefore did not testify. The jury, disbelieving his alibi for the murder, perhaps because he failed to testify in support of it, convicted him and gave him a death sentence.

Just before Thompson was set to be executed in 1999, his attorney learned of the suppressed lab report and the grave misconduct of the prosecutor. Armed with this, Thompson’s convictions for both the robbery and the murder were overturned. When he was retried for murder in 2003, a jury, armed with much more testimony and evidence, concluded that he was innocent.

remainder in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/04/hbc-90008045