Connick v. Thompson

563 U.S. 51 (2011)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

Connick (P), former prisoner, sued Thompson (D), district attorney, under 42 U.S.C.S. § 1983 for failure to train his prosecutors adequately about their duty to produce exculpatory evidence. P was charged with the murder of Raymond T. Liuzza, Jr. The victims of an unrelated armed robbery identified P as their attacker. The district attorney charged P with attempted armed robbery. As part of the robbery investigation, a crime scene technician took from one of the victims' pants a swatch of fabric stained with the robber's blood. The swatch was sent to the crime laboratory. Two days before the trial, Assistant District Attorney Bruce Whittaker received the crime lab's report, which stated that the perpetrator had blood type B. There is no evidence that the prosecutors ever had P's blood tested or that they knew what his blood type was. Whittaker claimed he placed the report on Assistant District Attorney James Williams' desk, but Williams denied seeing it. The report was never disclosed to P's counsel. Williams tried the armed robbery case with Assistant District Attorney Gerry Deegan. Deegan checked all of the physical evidence in the case out of the police property room, including the blood-stained swatch. Deegan then checked all of the evidence but the swatch into the courthouse property room. The prosecutors did not mention the swatch or the crime lab report at trial, and the jury convicted P of attempted armed robbery. Williams and Special Prosecutor Eric Dubelier tried P for the Liuzza murder. Because of the armed robbery conviction, P chose not to testify in his own defense. He was convicted and sentenced to death. Eventually, the State scheduled P's execution for May 20, 1999. In late April 1999, P's private investigator discovered the crime lab report. P has blood type O, proving that the blood on the swatch was not his. The Louisiana Court of Appeal then reversed P's murder conviction. After P discovered the crime lab report, former Assistant District Attorney Michael Riehlmann revealed that Deegan had confessed to him in 1994 that he had “intentionally suppressed blood evidence in the armed robbery trial. The Supreme Court of Louisiana reprimanded Riehlmann for failing to disclose Deegan's admission earlier. P testified in his own defense at the second trial and presented evidence suggesting that another man committed the murder. That man, the government's key witness at the first murder trial, had died in the interval between the first and second trials. P was found not guilty. P sued Ds alleging that their conduct caused him to be wrongfully convicted, incarcerated for 18 years and nearly executed. P alleged that the Brady violation was caused by an unconstitutional policy of the district attorney's office; and the violation was caused by D's deliberate indifference to an obvious need to train the prosecutors in his office in order to avoid such constitutional violations. D conceded that the failure to produce the crime lab report constituted a Brady violation. The Brady violation conceded, in this case, occurred when one or more of the four prosecutors involved with Thompson's armed robbery prosecution failed to disclose the crime lab report to P's counsel. The “only issue” was whether the nondisclosure was caused by either a policy, practice, or custom of the district attorney's office or a deliberately indifferent failure to train the office's prosecutors. The jury found D's office liable for failing to train the prosecutors. The jury awarded P $14 million in damages, and the District Court added more than $1 million in attorney's fees and costs. The court rejected D’s argument that a pattern of violations is necessary to prove deliberate indifference when the need for training is so obvious. The Court of Appeals affirmed and held that P did not need to present evidence of a pattern. An en banc hearing divided evenly on the issue which upheld the lower court. The Supreme Court granted certiorari.