You’re about to learn about an innocent man who served 14 years on death row and almost died, because prosecutors hid evidence that cleared him. When it came to light, he was retried and acquitted. He sued the prosecutors office, and won a substantial settlement, as he richly deserved for his settlement. In a 5-4 decision, the Republican extremists on SCOTUS took it away from him. The opinion was written by Teabagger extraordinaire, Clarence Thomas.

John Thompson served 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, for a murder and an armed robbery he did not commit. The prosecution’s case had been a house of cards: Thompson did not match the eyewitness description originally given of the murderer (although the most crucial witness against him did), and a blood test taken from the scene proved that he did not commit the robbery . If the blood evidence should have exonerated him before either case went to trial, why did he come so close to being executed?

It happened, quite simply, because prosecutors withheld the critical blood evidence . Since the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in Brady v. Maryland, suppressing evidence favorable to the defendant has been recognized as a violation of the Constitution — since then, failures to turn over exculpatory evidence have been known as "Brady violations." Because of a series of lucky breaks, Thompson and his attorneys happened to find out about the illegal suppression of evidence, and after more than two decades of legal wrangling and a disgraceful attempt to retry him that resulted in an acquittal after only 35 minutes of jury deliberation, he was finally free. For obvious reasons, following his vindication, Thompson sued the New Orleans district attorney’s office for violating his civil rights. A jury awarded him $14 million. Of course, no ending to Thompson’s story could be happy, but he at least received substantial compensation for the gross violation of his rights.

But the injustice didn’t end there. Earlier this week, a bare majority of the Supreme Court threw out the jury award. Speaking through Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court’s five Republican appointees held that New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. was not legally liable for the criminal actions of the prosecutors under his supervision. According to Thomas, Thompson did not "prove a pattern of similar violations" that would make the D.A.’s office responsible for illegally suppressing exculpatory evidence.

As Justice Ruth-Bater Ginsburg’s closely argued dissent pointed out, there was an obvious long-running pattern of misbehavior. The violations of Thompson’s rights, she writes, "were not singular and they were not aberrational": They resulted from prosecutorial misconduct over a nearly 20-year period. If this doesn’t constitute a pattern for which the D.A. can be responsible, it’s unclear what would, particularly given how hard it is to uncover evidence of Brady violations. The jury also had other reasons for finding that Connick was "deliberately indifferent" to whether the prosecutors in his office followed Brady. Connick and other senior prosecutors were unable even to correctly articulate what the Brady decision requires of prosecutors, nor did prosecutors in the office receive training explaining them. Despite all this, the conservative wing of the Court elected to compound the injustices inflicted on Thompson by throwing out the jury verdict.