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| Louisiana Death Row |
"When the judge sentenced me to death, he tells you about how he is going to kill you," Thompson said. "How much electric volts are going to run through your body."
"I wasn't ready for what was ahead of me," he said.
Innocence Irrelevant
Thompson spent the first four years of his incarceration at the Orleans Parish Prison. But the true reality of his death sentence didn't hit him until guards moved him to Angola.
He arrived at his cell to find the clothes of man who had just been executed, still inside.
"That really blew me away," Thompson recalled. "I started throwing the stuff out in the hallway. They were laughing at me, saying, 'You better get used to that little brother.'"
However, there was not much laughter during his 14 years of solitary confinement.
"John Thompson, while he was on death row, had seven stays of execution," said Gauthier, recounting some of his research for the book. "That means he had the death warrant brought to his cell. He was prepared for execution seven times."
"It's not about whether you did it or not anymore," Thompson said. "It's irrelevant. It is totally irrelevant whether you are innocent or not because they are here to kill you. So you have one common goal and that is to try to stay alive by any means necessary."
Before Thompson could be executed, a death bed confession from an original prosecutor led investigators to uncovered evidence: blood test results, testimonies, and conflicting eyewitness accounts.
"He was actually re-tried and it took the jury less than 35 minutes to acquit him of the murder," Gauthier said. "So John was freed."
Source: CBN News, Sept. 19, 2012
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