Mr. Thompson sued the New Orleans district attorney’s office for failing to train prosecutors about their constitutional obligations to turn over exculpatory evidence. The jury awarded him $14 million, one of the largest-ever verdicts in a wrongful-conviction case. He never saw a dime of it.

In an exceptionally cruel and disingenuous ruling, the Supreme Court threw out Mr. Thompson’s award in 2011, by a 5-to-4 vote. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said Mr. Thompson had not shown that the misconduct in his case was caused by a failure to train, or that there was a pattern of such misconduct.

This was, to put it kindly, bunk. Under the 30-year reign of District Attorney Harry Connick, ignoring the Constitution to help win convictions was “standard operating procedure,” as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a stinging dissent. In Mr. Thompson’s case, “no fewer than five prosecutors” were involved in hiding evidence or knew about it, she wrote, yet all declined “despite multiple opportunities, spanning nearly two decades, to set the record straight.”

Last month, the lawyer who represented Mr. Connick’s office before the Supreme Court, Kyle Duncan, was nominated by President Trump to a judgeship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Assuming Mr. Duncan gets confirmed, at least Mr. Thompson won’t have to endure the insult of reading about it.

He died on Tuesday of a heart attack. He was 55.

In an op-ed article for this newspaper after the Supreme Court overturned his award, Mr. Thompson wrote, “I don’t care about the money.” He cared about punishing the prosecutors who had wronged him and many others. “Of the six men one of my prosecutors got sentenced to death, five eventually had their convictions reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct,” he wrote. And then there were the 4,000 inmates serving life without parole at Angola prison, where he had been locked up, but who had no access to a lawyer. How many, he wondered, had also been framed?