The article you linked is an editorial about the Supreme Court decision. It’s got some 6-7 sentences summarizing the facts of the case. Do you think that since a short editorial about the Supreme Court decision itself in the New York Times didn’t include a wealth of information about what the New Orleans D.A. office may have done a few years ago to clean up its act means that nothing was done? BTW, Connick retired from the D.A.'s office in 2003, so it’s impossible to fire him.
Now that the Thompson decision has been clarified, I feel like I’d be hijacking this thread if I continue to discuss it.
Correct. The most common myth I hear is that if you live with a member of the opposite sex for 7 years, then you are married by common law. False. There is no time period, most states don’t recognize it, and the ones who do have requirements like you outlined.
I think it’d be great if you didn’t use General Questions as a place to show your ignorance about America every chance you get. But since you refuse to do that I will try and explain what you obviously do not understand:
- By and large both the U.S. Federal Government and all fifty state governments have sovereign immunity this means that they are generally immune from being sued. This is spelled out explicitly in our constitution and has been affirmed throughout the years by our Supreme Court. So how is it that governments get sued all the time?
Well, one of the big reasons is our law makers are elected officials. Over the years as States and the Federal government have committed torts and pissed people off, laws and regulations have been promulgated that essentially allow the Federal and various State governments to “waive” their sovereign immunity in certain scenarios. Mostly because the people wanted it that way, technically the government still has its sovereign immunity but under statute, it is waived in certain cases under certain conditions.
Under Federal law, individuals can sue State governments for depriving them of their civil rights. This is where Title 42, Chapter 21, Subchapter 1, Section 1983 of the United States Code comes into play (42 U. S. C. §1983 if you will) §1983 says that:
What this thus says is if you deprive someone of their Civil Rights you can be sued for it in Federal court. At specific issue in this case is the civil rights elucidated in *Brady v. Maryland. *Brady was a case in the U.S. Supreme Court which established that withholding of evidence by the prosecution that would exonerate the defendant or aid the defendant’s case is a violation of the defendant’s right to due process (one of their civil rights.)
Alright, so with that framing what we have is a civil suit, someone is being sued by someone else. The person doing the suing (the plaintiff) is one John Thompson. John Thompson was accused of robbery and murder and convicted and sentenced to death. It ends up Harry Connick, Sr., a prosecutor, had evidence that would have aided Thompson’s case. When this came out his conviction was set aside and he became a free man. He spent time in prison and on death row because of the prosecutor’s action.
Thompson decides to sue Harry Connick, Sr. in his official capacity and thus that means if Thompson was to win, it would be the Orleans Parish government that would pay the damages. Thompson sues in Federal court because he asserts that the Parish violated his due process rights and that means that under 42 U. S. C. §1983 this is a Federal matter. Under our common law system previous court rulings and precedent are very important. Previous precedent had dealt with such issues in the past, what precedent had shown is that to successfully sue a prosecutor’s office for a Brady violation in Federal court it would have to be demonstrated that the prosecutor’s office had a deliberate indifference to training its prosecutors to avoid committing Brady violations. Thompson’s argument was that the very fact that this single incident happened to him, is evidence that the prosecutor’s office was committing deliberate indifference. The Supreme Court held that precedent says one incident is not enough, and that to have prevailed Thompson should have attempted and then succeeded in demonstrating that this particular prosecutor’s office had a pattern of indifference.
Under the law it was the right decision, at least according to the highest arbiters of that law. Now there is a good argument to be made that maybe we should consider incidents like this evidence of deliberate indifference, some of the justices felt that way, but SCOTUS decisions are rarely going to be unanimous on a contentious issue.
As for Harry Connick, Sr., why wasn’t he immediately arrested? Well a few reasons:
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This was a civil suit against Harry Connick, not a criminal suit against him. Just because evidence of a crime is conceded in a civil suit does not mean someone goes to jail right away. Instead, that person would have to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted. In a whole separate trial in a whole separate system (criminal vs. civil.)
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Why wasn’t a criminal process started? Well, because just fucking up as a prosecutor isn’t a crime. If you actually read the decision you would note that even Thompson isn’t claiming Connick deliberately violated his Brady rights. Instead Thompson is claiming that Connick’s failure to afford him proper due process under the Brady rules was a result of the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s deliberate indifference to properly training their prosecutors. So essentially the plaintiff himself is saying this was a result of bad training on an institutional level so “I’m entitled to $14m compensation since this was the failure of the District Attorney’s office at large.” (By the way, on a moral level I’d be happy with Thompson having $14m, I feel for the guy.)
What this means is that if prosecutors wanted to have Connick arrested and tried just the fact that it was conceded by the District Attorney’s office that a Brady violation occurred does not mean it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Connick committed a crime. You would instead have to prove intent and that is not as easy as proving something happened.
If you’re carrying garbage out of your second floor apartment and a small rip is in the bag and a banana peel falls out onto the stairs, unknown to you, and someone comes down the stairs a moment later, slips on the peel and dies we may be able to prove you had a hand in their death. We know someone died, and we know who is responsible. But without knowing intent we definitely can’t say if it was murder. In fact, in that case we might even be able to say you were ignorant of the fact the banana fell out, so we can’t even prove that you personally were committing willful indifference. So it would be very hard to convict you of any crime. Connick is in the same boat, if he was charged he could use the same argument Thompson used against him in court: he was not aware he was committing a Brady violation and thus he was not deliberately hiding evidence. Prosecutors are not required to charge on every crime, they are required to serve the public’s interest and the public interest is not always served by a trial that cannot be won.
Further, the SCOTUS did not rule that it is okay to violate someone’s Brady rights. They instead said that there are statutes in place that specify the manner in which entities can be sued for violating civil rights. Further, case law has precedent on when a prosecutor’s office can be held liable for these sort of things, and this case did not fit the statute or the precedent. It is not the role of the court to condemn the plaintiff or the defendant at that point, but to clarify the law, which is what they did. The SCOTUS is not there to decide on what it feels is right but on what is right under our constitution and what is right under existing law. Under both of those things they ruled Thompson had not satisfied the requirements of his case against the District Attorney’s office.
What you’re essentially saying about America over this is the equivalent of:
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A cop in Germany beating someone up and getting sued, but for whatever reason the court case does not go against him and he ends up not having to pay damages.
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German courts say it is okay for the police to beat people up.
In every legal system people who should lose lawsuits win them, people that should have to pay do not, people that should go to jail do not, and people that shouldn’t go to jail sometimes do.