Because prosecutors withheld ten pieces of exculpatory evidence, John Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row. A jury verdict against the prosecutor’s office that would have awarded him a million dollars for every year that he spent facing the death penalty was recently overturned by the Supreme Court’s reactionary majority.

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.

Worst of all, I wasn’t the only person they played dirty with. Of the six men one of my prosecutors got sentenced to death, five eventually had their convictions reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct. Because we were sentenced to death, the courts had to appoint us lawyers to fight our appeals. I was lucky, and got lawyers who went to extraordinary lengths. But there are more than 4,000 people serving life without parole in Louisiana, almost none of whom have lawyers after their convictions are final. Someone needs to look at those cases to see how many others might be innocent.

If a private investigator hired by a generous law firm hadn’t found the blood evidence, I’d be dead today. No doubt about it.

If only these really were the End Times — of the conservative decadence in the United States.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, April 11th, 2011 at 8:00 pm.