In 1984, JT began a journey into the depths of the criminal legal system, culminating in a long-awaited exoneration after serving 14 years on death row at Angola Prison, with 7 stays of execution.

His two cases, one for an armed robbery charge, and another for the murder of Ray Liuzza Jr., were prosecuted under Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. His thirty-year reign of terror included a reported 32 exonerations, with four of those people sentenced to death, and twenty-three to life without parole sentences. 97% of these exonerees were Black.

Connick’s office manipulated the order of JT’s cases, trying him for an armed robbery of a family that only identified him as the perpetrator after his arrest for the Liuzza murder made front page news. This order made it possible to use that guilty conviction to seek the death penalty, painting JT as someone with a history of violence. It was during this trial that someone in Connick office hid blood evidence that proved JT did not rob this family. Hear more about this discovery in investigator Elisa Abolafia’s oral history.

Following his exoneration, he was awarded a $14 million judgement against Connick and his office, $1 million for every year he was held unjustly in Angola. The state appealed the decision. In 2011, in a majority opinion written by Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court struck down the ruling. As his friends note, it was not the loss of money that moved him to spend the rest of his life fighting for justice — it was the thought of all those who, like him, lost decades of their lives to the system, had to rebuild families and communities, and faced incredible violence and even death.

The Connick v. Thompson precedent effectively means that prosecutors cannot be held liable for misconduct within their offices, encouraging a system that prioritizes conviction rates as a measure of success, rather than true justice.

John spent the rest of his life fighting to hold prosectors accountable, and educating future lawyers about the impact of wrongful convictions. Learn more in the oral histories of Professor Andrea Armstrong and Mercedes Montagnes, who both became dear friends of JT, and partners in the fight for prosecutorial accountability, after meeting him during their time in law school.