HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
THE UNTOUCHABLES
He paces as he talks. His voice
soars and breaks. At times, he gets
within a few inches of me, jabbing his finger in my direction for
emphasis. Thompson pauses as he
takes a phone call from his wife.
His tone changes for the duration of the conversation. Then he
hangs up and resumes with the
indignation. “What would I do
with their apology anyway? Sorry.
Huh. Sorry you tried to kill me?
Sorry you tried to commit premeditated murder? No. No thank
you. I don’t need your apology.”
The wrongly convicted often
show remarkable grace and humility. It’s inspiring to see, if a little
difficult to understand; even after
years or decades in prison, exonerees are typically marked by an
absence of bitterness.
Not Thompson, but you can
hardly blame him. Even among
outrageous false conviction stories,
his tale is particularly brutal. He
was wrongly convicted not once,
but twice — separately — for a carjacking and a murder. He spent 18
years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, 14 of them on death row.
His death warrant was signed eight
times. When his attorneys finally
found the evidence that cleared
him — evidence his prosecutors
had known about for years — he
was weeks away from execution.
But what most enrages Thompson — and what drives his activism today — is that in the end,
there was no accountability. His
case produced a surfeit of prosecutorial malfeasance, from incompetence, to poor training, to a cul-
“They tried to kill me.
To apologize would
mean they’re admitting
the system is broken.”
ture of conviction that included
both willfully ignoring evidence
that could have led to his exoneration, to blatantly withholding
it. Yet the only attorney ever disciplined in his case was a former
prosecutor who eventually aided
in Thompson’s defense.
“This isn’t about bad men,
though they were most assuredly
bad men,” Thompson says. “It’s
about a system that is void of integrity. Mistakes can happen. But
if you don’t do anything to stop
them from happening again, you
can’t keep calling them mistakes.”
Over the last year or so, a number of high-profile stories have
fostered discussion and analysis
of prosecutorial power, discretion