HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
THE UNTOUCHABLES
fought both convictions, eventually with the assistance of attorneys
at Loyola University’s Capital Defense Project and Gordon Cooney
and Michael Banks, both attorneys at Morgan and Lewis, a corporate law firm in Philadelphia.
Thompson was up against a
prosecutorial climate that critics
had long claimed valued convictions over all else, one that saw a
death sentence as the profession’s
brass ring. The New York Times
reported in 2003 that prosecutors
in Louisiana often threw parties
after winning death sentences.
They gave one another informal
awards for murder convictions,
including plaques with hypodermic needles bearing the names of
the convicted. In Jefferson Parish,
just outside of New Orleans, some
wore neckties decorated with images of nooses or the Grim Reaper.
One of Thompson’s prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney
James Williams, told the Los Angeles Times in 2007, “There was
no thrill for me unless there was a
chance for the death penalty.”
Williams kept a replica electric
chair on his desk. “It was hooked
up to a battery, so you’d get a little
jolt when you touched it,” recalls
Michael Banks, one of Thompson’s
attorneys. In 1995, Williams posed
with this mini-execution chair in
Esquire magazine. On the chair’s
headboard, he had affixed the photos of the five men he had sent to
death row, including Thompson.
Of those five, two would later be
exonerated and two more would
“He said we needed to
focus on the murder.
So I pled guilty to the
robberies. I wish I
hadn’t. But I was 16.
I was a child. You do
what your attorney tells
you to do.”
have their sentences commuted.
By 1999, Thompson had already forestalled seven death
warrants, and was staring down
number eight. He had exhausted
most of his legal options, and was
just weeks from execution. In a
last-ditch effort to save him, a
defense investigator went combing through old records at a New
Orleans police station and came
across the microfiche file that
would save Thompson’s life.
The file held the results of a
blood test performed on a swatch
of clothing taken from one of the