$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.
And in this environment of leveraged fear, John Thomson and far too many others are just collateral damage that now it seems there is no one to accept blame for and in the end if he and the rest have little or no recourse for compensation for stolen years it will weaken the wider quest to fix errors. The underlying message of these kinds of decisions only adds to the fear that there is no true democracy with a responsive government that will respond properly to mistakes. Fear of what is supposed to be a democratic government only serves those who wish to undermine actual democracy and who are reshaping it to their own ends. Those who use fear as a tool need to keep people at least trusting all the supposed warriors against criminals. Mistrust of criminal justice does not serve those who want us to be more helpless and afraid of other things than necessary. Too much fear allows those who claim to be the protectors free reign in too much of society but they still need people to have faith in the protectors the corporate oligarchy increasingly control whether that faith is often misplaced or not. So there is plenty of motivation in blunting the attempts to out injustices and not only correct them but assign blame and gain just compensation for them.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Leon A. Cannizzaro Jr., the current district attorney in New Orleans, expressed relief over not having to pay a judgment that with interest was approaching $20 million, more than his office’s annual budget. He said his office “should not be held financially responsible for the intentional, unethical and illegal acts of a rogue prosecutor.”
Mr. Thompson expressed frustration about the Supreme Court’s ruling in his case, Connick v. Thompson, No. 09-571.
“If I’d spilled hot coffee on myself, I could have sued the person who served me the coffee,” he said. “But I can’t sue the prosecutors who nearly murdered me.”
There are plenty of foot-draggers in the justice system fighting the innocence movements... The Majority in the Supreme court ruling said the issue was not whether an injustice was done but rather if there was a culpable and extended awareness of misbehavior and that it was maintained by poor oversight and ineffective training. Further this was not the case since it was just one rogue prosecutor.
In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg wrote that “no fewer than five prosecutors” were complicit in a violation of Mr. Thompson’s constitutional rights. “They kept from him, year upon year, evidence vital to his defense.”
The prosecutors’ conduct, Justice Ginsburg wrote, “was a foreseeable consequence of lax training.” Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the dissent.
So if protecting the system as it is and shutting off restitution is the goal, what better way to succeed than making those who cause injustice impervious to any responsibility for it? Monetary awards and payouts do add to the pool of money available to investigate more suspected unjust, wrongful convictions. There are far more cases than all the groups working to identify and correct them but the more they succeed the more they gain support and donations from the public. To hamper this cutting off or eroding support and money is of prime importance along with publicity. If there are fewer successes because there is less capacity to pursue cases it will erode the overall effort. And public money is spent to fight all of this as well. Prosecutors, judges, investigators can and do work together to stymie and delay the process. And don't forget that overall control of who spends the money and what it is spent on is moving away from ordinary people who have given up on voting or keeping informed. The more people believe that what they think or want is ignored the more they will drop out and stop caring or cede control to the few who buy our elected officials with their campaign contributions...
There are still plenty of people in the Justice system who know they serve the people of the United States and that injustice can and must be identified and fixed properly and avoided in the future... They know that criminal justice is about finding the truth not about making examples of whoever fits the bill whether actually guilty or not. But more and more they are being replaced by those whose allegiance is to those they see as wiser and more fit to call the shots and who give them a free hand to abuse their power if they choose to do so to their own benefit. So while paying lip service to justice they find that "Success" is not defined so much as locking up the right person as just claiming and or believing they have done so and reap the resulting career rewards, plaudits and advancement. In that kind of situation all of us face a somewhat greater chance of being convicted unjustly and not having it corrected any time soon... and to those who gain from this state of affairs do not see any reason to be concerned.. because they don't care about you and me all that much despite claiming to do things in our name... John Thompson served as an example that benefited those who aided his unjust conviction 18 years ago and all these years later this setback in gaining compensation serves as another example and a warning... about what the public can expect in terms of justice and fairness.
as the Zappa song says:
"They just takes care of number one,
and number one ain't you
... you ain't even number two..."