Responses to $14m award granted to John Thompson
- John Thompson, photo from Resurrection After Exoneration
Updates on John Thompson’s $14 million judgment for his wrongful conviction provided by Ora Nitkin-Kaner, a 2008-2009 AVODAH Corps Member who works with John Thompson at Resurrection After Exoneration.
James Gill: Connick era bills come due
Posted by James Gill, Columnist, The Times-Picayune January 07, 2009 2:03AM
Angola’s death row isn’t such a bad place for an innocent man to spend 14 years, according to the New Orleans DA’s office. John Thompson did not deserve the $14 million a jury awarded him, because nobody raped him and he got to play chess and watch TV. He wasn’t denied medical treatment and made several pals in prison, prosecutors argued in an appeal brief.
That still didn’t sound like much fun to the judges, who left the judgment in place. DA Leon Cannizzaro will try again to have the judgment vacated, or the amount reduced, but all his arguments have been so comprehensively demolished that he can’t win.
Thompson was railroaded in 1983, when Harry Connick was DA, and sooner or later the taxpayer will have to cough up.
Cannizzaro certainly can’t find anything like that amount of money in his budget, so he might as well keep the appeals going and delay the day of reckoning.
But he will surely be laughed out of court if he sticks with the strategy of minimizing the horrors of death row. It is ludicrous to suggest that Thompson’s experience was made tolerable by friendships formed on death row, given that they tend to be abruptly and unceremoniously terminated. Not only did Thompson see other inmates whisked off to the execution chamber, but he had his own date set half a dozen times.
At Angola he spent 23 hours a day in a six-by-nine-foot cell without windows or air conditioning. Perhaps he did forge bonds with a few other condemned men, but there were also plenty of nutcases around, screaming out at all times of day and night and hurling excrement at the guards. The appeals court noted that “several witnesses testified to the stench that permeated” the joint.
Thompson received four visits a year from members of his family, and was otherwise left to contemplate his impending death. That he now appears to have adjusted to life on the outside, getting married and founding an organization to help other exonerated convicts, is testimony more to his strength of character than any lenity in the penal system. In any case, Thompson suffers from chronic post-traumatic stress, according to expert trial testimony.
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