Non-IPNO exonerees

John "JT" Thompson was 22 years-old in 1984 when he was wrongfully convicted of robbery and murder in Orleans Parish.

Mr. Thompson’s conviction for the robbery came first and was used against him at his murder trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death. No physical evidence linked Mr. Thompson to either crime. The State’s primary witness against Mr. Thompson was originally the primary suspect in the murder, but he cut a deal with the prosecutor to get a lesser sentence for himself in another case.

In the 14 years Mr. Thompson spent on death row, he repeatedly came within days of execution.

In 1999, weeks before he was scheduled to be executed, Mr. Thompson was saved when investigators working with his lawyers Nick Trenticosta, Michael Banks and Gordon Cooney found microfilm containing the results of blood typing the prosecutors had tried to destroy before Mr. Thompson’s trial.

The blood typing excluded Mr. Thompson from having committed the original robbery, a conviction which was used against him in his murder trial. A judge commuted Mr. Thompson’s death sentence to life without parole and later, an appeals court granted Mr. Thompson a new capital murder trial based on the denial of his right to testify at his original murder trial because he was framed in the robbery case. It was also revealed that the State had withheld significant evidence, including eyewitnesses who said the star witness against Mr. Thompson was in fact the single perpetrator of the crime, seen fleeing the scene. Evidence was also withheld that showed that Mr. Thompson, when arrested, clearly did not match the physical description of the perpetrator (the State's witness, however, did).

In May 2003, attorney Robert Glass presented Mr. Thompson’s case to an Orleans Parish jury which took only 35 minutes to acquit him of all charges. He  spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row and had survived eight execution dates.

Mr. Thompson now runs Resurrection After Exoneration (RAE), founded in 2007 by exonerees to promote and sustain a network of support amongst formerly wrongfully incarcerated individuals in the South. RAE works to reconnect exonerees to their communities and provide access to those opportunities of which they were robbed.