John "JT" Thompson

Profile image: 

In 1985, John “JT” Thompson was wrongfully convicted of two crimes: the attempted armed robbery of a university student and his two siblings; and the murder of Raymond T. Liuzza, Jr.

In both cases, prosecutors did not disclose critical evidence that, had the jury heard it, would likely have cleared Mr. Thompson. Because neither the jury in his armed robbery trial nor in his murder trial were apprised of all the evidence, Mr. Thompson was sentenced to 49 ½ years in prison in the armed robbery case, and just three weeks later, he was sentenced to death in the murder case. He spent 18 years in prison including 14 years in isolation on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

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

The blood typing was performed on one of the armed-robbery victims’ pants, where the perpetrator had bled. The blood tests excluded Mr. Thompson from having committed the attempted armed robbery. Because this conviction had been used against him during the penalty phase of the capital trial to successfully argue for the death penalty, his death sentence was thrown out by the courts and he was re-sentenced to life without parole.

Later, an appeals court granted Mr. Thompson a new capital murder trial because the fact of the prior armed robbery conviction had effectively kept him from testifying at his murder trial in his own defense. It was also revealed that the State had withheld significant evidence against Mr. Thompson, including eyewitnesses who described a single perpetrator fleeing the scene whose physical description  matched not Mr. Thompson, but the State’s main witness against him.

In May 2003, attorney Robert Glass represented Mr. Thompson at a retrial of the murder case where the jury which took a mere 35 minutes to acquit him of all charges.

Soon after, Mr. Thompson sued the prosecutors and the district attorney’s office for the misconduct in his cases. The jury awarded him $14 million in damages — $1 million for every year on death row — which was to be paid by the district attorney’s office. The Orleans Parish district attorney's office appealed and, in 2011, the United States Supreme Court reversed the decision, effectively removing the possibility of civil liability for prosecutors who withhold evidence in criminal cases.

Mr. Thompson is the director of Resurrection After Exoneration (RAE), an organization he founded in 2007 with the help of a fellowship award from Echoing Green. RAE provides a holistic re-entry service for other exonerated men, including housing, job and computer skills training, access to medical and mental health services and public speaking training. In addition to his Echoing Green fellowship, John was awarded a Petra Fellowship in 2009 and in 2011 he was awarded an OSI Justice Fellowship to create a public education and advocacy campaign to demand accountability for prosecutorial misconduct.