Spent 14 years on death row before he was exonerated

John Thompson, who spent 14 years on death row in Louisiana before being exonerated in a murder case that brought national attention to prosecutorial misconduct and the perils of wrongful conviction, died Oct. 3 at a hospital in New Orleans. He was 55.

Thompson was a 22-year-old self-described “small-time weed dealer” in 1985, when his legal nightmare began.

That January, he was arrested, after authorities received a tip, for the murder weeks earlier of Ray Liuzza Jr., a New Orleans hotelier. His face splashed across the news, Thompson was then identified as the alleged assailant in an unrelated earlier carjacking.

Prosecutors put him on trial first for the carjacking, winning a conviction in April 1985. The next month, he was convicted in the murder case.

In large part because of the prior carjacking conviction, prosecutors successfully argued Thompson should penalty.

As controversy mounted in his case, a lawyer came forward to say his friend, a former prosecutor by then deceased, had confessed on his deathbed he had concealed the lab report to more easily convict Thompson. A 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland bars prosecutors from denying exculpatory evidence to a defendant.

In 1999, New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. joined Thompson’s lawyers in requesting a stay of execution. The stay was granted, a new trial was ordered, the carjacking charge was eventually dropped, and Thompson was removed from death row.

He received a new murder trial and, in 2003, was acquitted.

After his release, Thompson brought a civil suit against Connick’s office, winning damages of $14 million.

In 2011, the Court dismissed in a 5-4 decision. receive the death Supreme the award