$14 Million Jury Award to Ex-Inmate Is Dismissed
New York Times, March 29, 2011
The Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a $14 million jury award in favor of a former death row inmate who was freed after prosecutorial misconduct came to light.
The 5-to-4 decision divided along the court’s ideological fault line and prompted the first dissent read from the bench this term, from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The former inmate, John Thompson, had sued Harry F. Connick, a former district attorney in New Orleans, saying his office had not trained prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence. Prosecutors in the office had failed to give Mr. Thompson’s lawyers a report showing that blood at a crime scene was not his.
Regardless of the merits of the majority's arguments in this ruling on the wider stage it is just another ratchet in the right's quest to neutralize democracy and reinforce its dominance and the power of its pawns and enablers.
the LA legislature could in theory vote on a special bill to compensate him just our of fairness.... won't hold my breath but we do have a government that is meant to be by the people, for the people and of the people so why not? What those who are hired to act in our name do in the end is our collective social responsibility to fix if things like injustice at their hands. The government is only as good as we are aware of and resolve to make it. And those who want us to lose all faith in it are those who do not want it to serve us... the small proportion of society who increasingly and effectively own and employ our elected officials want government to serve them not us.
And along with that they want the majority who have less and less say in it to pay for more of its costs while allowing more and more privatization to further enrich the few at the expense of the many... And compensating those crushed by its failings is just one of many areas deemed unnecessary. (It wold be just one of many things that if allowed could imply that revenues ought to increase. Taxes on the most wealthy to the point where they pay what they paid back in the 1950's under Eisenhower or under Nixon or even Reagan would make this more affordable not to mention get rid of the deficit)
And along the way any innocent citizens who are crushed by a dysfunctional justice system become less and less important in this kind of a social contract. The excessively stoked fears of crime that allow corrupt and self-serving people to advance in a criminal justice system benefits the few who use this fear-button issue to advance their overall agenda... "look dangerous criminals over there, let us do anything and everything to be tough on crime" and while people worry excessively about crime and other supposedly related "scariness", power accumulates more power and money accumulates more money without too much attention to how they do that.
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