had drained out of his face and he said the district attorney s office had pulled the deal. we thought john was walking out of jail the next day. this was five days before the trial was to start. and the d.a. said no deal. we go to trial. as it turned out the victim s family had learned of the plea deal and voiced their objections to the district attorney. michael and i go to the prison and he put on a very brave face. he said i didn t want that plea, it was going to hang over my head for the rest of my life. i didn t want to do this. you guys are going to win this case but we just lost four days of preparation because we thought there was no trial. we need some more time to prepare for the case. he said you won t do that. we re going to win this case. i can t spend another day in this place. as we walked down a long corridor we turn around and look back and there is john with his head in his hands. we thought he was getting out of jail the next day. and now we found out that h
please dig it up for me. and she did. the hospital records showed that thompson had blood type o. it was a smoking gun that demonstrated that thompson was innocent of the carjacking beyond question. and there s no question that the prosecution had clear obligation to turn over evidence that s favorable to the defense. the carjacking victims had clearly misidentified thompson. eyewitness testimony is so unreliable. and the more traumatic the event is that they witnessed, the more likely it is they re going to be wrong in their recollections and their identifications. with clear evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, michael and gordon now felt they had no choice but to go after the legendary district attorney of new orleans parrish, harry connick sr. he was an iconic figure, he had a regular singing gig in new orleans.
then you sending me some lawyers saying they re going to represent me. come on, get real. gordon and i normally represent big companies in employment litigation and trade secret litigation, but this is my first case in criminal case litigation. michael brajss and banks and gordon cooney will interest in high profile cases. i remember feeling a very strong sense that things that happened in john s trial were just fundamentally unfair. banks and cooney wednesday to meet their new client. the first time i met john thompson was at the louisiana state penitentiary at aarngola.
i said yes. we hugged, we were ecstatic. as michael and gordon began preparing for the retrial, they got an unsolicited offer from the d.a. s office, harry connick senior had retired and the new d.a. ran for office on an anti-corruption campaign. now, he wanted to make a deal. the district attorney s office was not eager to go and try this case again, based on the evidence as it then existed. john could plead to some lesser offense and be immediately released from prison. i m like, hell no. i m not pleading guilty to nothing. after all this stuff we proved, these people are still trying to make me plead guilty to something i didn t do. the jury got it wrong twice before, there was some risk that a jury would get it wrong again, no matter how strong the evidence was. much as we were convinced of john s innocence, we had to think about getting him out of
to stand trial with a risk of spending the rest of his life in prison. on the morning of may 7th, 2003, john thomson stood before the same judge in the same courtroom where he had been sentenced to death 18 years earlier. michael and gordon had a problem. they couldn t attack the damaging testimony of kevin freeman, the man they believed murdered ray liuzza. he was shot dead in 1995 while committing a robbery. with freeman dead, his previous testimony stood as evidence that thompson had committed the liuzza murder. we had all this evidence that freeman had lied in his original testimony and we wouldn t be able to use that evidence effectively if we couldn t cross examine him live on the stand. michael and gordon proposed