Exonerated inmate won't get $14M

WASHINGTON  A divided U.S. Supreme Court made it more difficult to sue local prosecutors' offices for wrongdoing on Tuesday, overturning a $14 million verdict for a New Orleans man who came within weeks of being executed for a murder he did not commit.

The man, John Thompson, was convicted of a 1984 murder and a separate carjacking. He was set free 18 years later after his lawyers discovered that the prosecutors in charge of his trial had deliberately concealed evidence — a blood sample and police lab report — that could have proved his innocence. Prosecutors have a constitutional duty to disclose such evidence.

Writing for the court's 5-4 majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said that Thompson could not show that the New Orleans district attorney was "deliberately indifferent" to those such abuses because he could not point to a pattern of similar violations in previous criminal cases. Without that, Thomas wrote, the court could not conclude that the prosecutors' boss, former District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., was on notice that better training was needed to prevent violations.

Tuesday's decision is the latest in a series of rulings that have made it more difficult to sue prosecutors and their bosses over misconduct. The court decided 35 years ago that individual prosecutors are immune from civil rights lawsuits for their work in the courtroom.

The violations in Thompson's case were similar to those documented last year by a USA TODAY investigation of misconduct by federal prosecutors. The newspaper detailed 201 criminal cases since 1997 in which judges concluded that federal prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules, sending innocent people to jail and setting guilty people free.

Thompson sued Connick's office after he was exonerated, alleging that the former DA — father of the singer Harry Connick Jr. — had failed to train his prosecutors properly.

"What it does, unfortunately, is it sends a message that a pattern and practice like this isn't going to have economic consequences," said Joe Lawless, an Philadelphia defense attorney and expert on prosecutorial misconduct.

One of Thompson's attorneys, J. Gordon Cooney Jr., said that "if prosecutors' offices cannot be held accountable under the facts of this case, it is difficult to imagine when they would be accountable."

Thomas was joined by Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. Scalia also joined the majority but wrote a separate opinion questioning whether prosecutors in Thompson's case actually violated their constitutional duties, even though the DA's office conceded that they did.

The court's four liberal justices —Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor— dissented. Ginsburg took the unusual step of reading parts of her long, impassioned dissent from the bench.

Ginsburg, whose outrage at the majority decision was palpable, pointed specifically to Connick's role: "Ample evidence presented at the civil rights trial demonstrated that Connick's deliberately indifferent attitude created a tinderbox in which Brady violations were nigh inevitable," she said, referring to a 1963 case, Brady v. Maryland, in which the court said prosecutors must inform defendants of evidence that points to their innocence.

She warned that such violations are "bound to be repeated unless municipal agencies bear responsibility" for making sure prosecutors follow the rules. "What happened here ... was no momentary oversight, no single incident of a lone officer's misconduct," she wrote.

New Orleans District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro acknowledged that Thompson's case was not handled properly, but said New Orleans' taxpayers should not be on the hook for the "intentional criminal misconduct" of the individual prosecutors who broke the rules.

Cannizzaro, who was elected in 2008, said prosecutors now get regular training. "We want to win our cases by obtaining legal convictions, constitutional convictions," he said.

Contributing: Joan Biskupic