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| John Thompson |
John Thompson was a 22-year-old father of two when the New Orleans police broke down his door to arrest him. What happened next was like a nightmare. He was taken to the homicide division, where he listened to a cassette tape of a man he knew accuse him of murder. The acquaintance had sold him a gun recently, which turned out to be the murder weapon. Then, other people around the neighborhood started coming forward with additional, unrelated crime reports and pinned them on Thompson. A neighbor said that he looked like the man who robbed his children. He became a suspect for an unsolved armed robbery that had occurred weeks earlier.
Thompson was tried and convicted for the robbery. In a second trial, he was found guilty of murder. The judge used his criminal history—which consisted solely of the robbery—to justify the death penalty as punishment for the homicide. Two and a half years after his initial arrest, Thompson arrived on death row at Angola prison, where he’d spend the next 14 years. Over that time, he was given six execution dates. He watched 12 other men leave death row and never come back.
“Cruel and unusual punishment starts there –to watch a man that claimed to be innocent, walk away, claiming he’s innocent all the way, and then you know he don’t return because he’d been executed,” Thompson said in an interview with WUNC at the Innoncence Network Conference. “Mentally tortured. I can’t tell you how many days that beat me up.”
What Thompson didn’t know while he was in prison was that the prosecutors hadn’t brought all of their evidence to his trial. Days before his final execution date, Thompson’s lawyers hired an investigator to search one last time for anything that might help. The investigator found a microfiche previously unknown to Thompson’s lawyers that contained information about the blood type of the individual who committed the armed robbery. It did not match Thompson’s.
Source: WUNC, June 10, 2013
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