Six Months Out
John Thompson talks about his sons, the time he wrongly spent on death row and his half-year of freedom.
By
Katy Reckdahl
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"My mind would light with images of me being strapped to
the chair, the sound of electricity ringing in my head,"
John Thompson once wrote about his 18 years on death row.
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| Photo
by Donn Young |
A small piece of microfiche had pulled John Thompson to freedom,
after 18 years spent on Louisiana's death row.
Now an everyday sight -- a pregnant woman waiting for a streetcar
-- was pulling him across busy St. Charles Avenue and over the
streetcar tracks. "It was the most beautiful thing," Thompson
says. "She was in her own little world, eyes closed, rubbing
her stomach." Seeing her reminded him of the times, two decades
ago, before his own sons were born. "You forget about the beauty
of small things," he says. "You've been gone from them for so
long."
This Saturday marks the six-month anniversary of Thompson's
freedom. But in the spring of 1999, all of his appeals had been
exhausted and his eighth -- and final -- execution date was
only a month away. Then an investigator, hired as a last-ditch
effort by his pro bono legal team, discovered a piece of microfiche
containing a crucial 1985 lab report. In November 2002, the
Louisiana Fourth Circuit ruled that Thompson deserved a new
murder trial, citing the prosecution's "intentional hiding"
of evidence.
On May 8 of this year, Thompson was acquitted of the murder
charge that he'd been convicted of exactly 18 years before.
He became the 108th person to be exonerated from this nation's
death rows since 1973.
Now, as he heads from his office to a nearby coffeeshop, Thompson
chuckles at the absurdity of a co-worker's order -- a double-tall,
non-fat latte -- then heads out into the damp day and lights
up a cigarette while he walks. He's in the midst of an impassioned,
detailed explanation of his case when he stops short next to
a well-groomed tabby with long white whiskers.
"Look at how pretty that cat's face is," he says, watching
for a few seconds as the latest marvel extends its front paws
and stretches.
"Turn right," says Thompson, pointing toward the corner of
a vast concrete parking lot. For some of the most stable years
of his life, until about age 14, this was his childhood block
-- Euterpe between Baronne and Carondelet streets. Right here,
he points, is where his best friend James Wise lived with his
grandmother. Her house has now been bulldozed.
Next door was Thompson's grandmother, who raised him for much
of his youth. Her house is also gone. She passed away in 1995
and, a year later, was followed by her son, Thompson's father.
As a death-row inmate, Thompson couldn't attend either funeral.
Thompson looks out at the blank expanse of concrete and recalls
the day in 1985 when he stood in the courtroom and received
his death sentence. He was then escorted back to the tier at
Orleans Parish Prison that houses people sentenced to 99 years
or more. State inmates like Thompson are typically kept at OPP
for their first few years, until their direct-appeals process
is finished.
He was only 22, a good-looking young man who now had to worry
that his good looks would get him raped, something that was
happening to many of the young men around him, he says.
The old-timers on the tier warned Thompson not to waste his
time worrying about lost girlfriends, because no one with a
sentence like his could expect someone to stick by him. That
advice soon turned out to be true. So at night, as he laid back
on his bunk, his mind raced about one thing, he says. "I'd think,
'What is going to happen to my sons?'" At the time, they were
young boys -- Dedric was 6 and John Jr. had just turned 4.
Kids were only permitted to visit OPP once a year, at Christmas,
and since Thompson was arrested on Jan. 17, 1985, he didn't
see his sons for nearly a year. When he finally saw them, on
Christmas 1985 and Christmas 1986, it was for 10 minutes, through
a window about the size of a cereal box, covered by wire-mesh
screen that had been painted over a number of times, making
the mesh smaller and more difficult to see through.
On Sept. 1, 1987, Thompson arrived at the Louisiana State
Penitentiary at Angola and was assigned a cell on death row
that still held a man's clothes and belongings. The previous
inmate, Sterling Rault, had been executed several days before,
a fact that "spooked the hell out of me," Thompson says.
That year, Louisiana had executed eight men -- one-third of
the people executed in the entire nation. Every month or so,
says Thompson, it seemed like someone he had met or befriended
was headed to Camp D and its electric chair.
Death seemed very close. "My mind would light with images
of me being strapped to the chair, the sound of electricity
ringing in my head," Thompson wrote for a Web site (http://liberty504.tripod.com).
The site was arranged for him with the help of Shareef Cousin,
who walked off death row in 1999 after his conviction was thrown
out by the Louisiana Supreme Court.
Thompson's kids could visit him at Angola. But the trip from
New Orleans was so long and expensive that he only saw his sons
a few times each year. Once again it was through a screen --
although a much bigger screen than OPP's. He wasn't able to
hug his sons for 10 years, until 1995, when they were teenagers
and Angola began allowing contact visits, a policy that continued
until 1999, when there was an escape from death row.
When Thompson laid in his bed at night, his thoughts still
were on his sons. He knew that John Jr. had a strong male role
model in maternal grandfather Nathaniel Williams, Sr., who worked
at Charity Hospital and had always provided for his family.
Then there was his older son, Dedric -- Thompson was worried
about him.
That's partly because the old neighborhood is not a place
where young men grow old gracefully, Thompson says, looking
around at the few houses that remain on Euterpe Street. He passes
the former store that sold gingerbread cookies, the cab company's
parking lot where he first learned to break into cars, the now-razed
corner houses where he was known as a club-hopper, a hustler
and a small-time drug dealer, slinging and smoking weed and
freebasing cocaine.
"Take a left here," Thompson says, directing the car to a
narrow street where his mother grew up. It's also where a customer
of Thompson's used a ring and a .357-caliber Magnum to pay for
a clickem, a marijuana joint laced with PCP. The ring had belonged
to hotel executive Raymond Liuzza Jr., and the gun was the murder
weapon that had fatally wounded Liuzza with five bullets in
this very neighborhood on Dec 6, 1984.
Thompson says that when he was growing up, most of the older
men from around here were either dead or -- like his father
-- in jail most of the time. Now, most of his own friends are
dead. "If they're not, they're worn down, from drugs and alcohol,"
he says.
It's a little after 6 p.m., a perfect time to stop at the
Church's Chicken on Claiborne Avenue and Martin Luther King
Boulevard. Inside, Thompson orders a three-piece chicken with
a side of fries, and hugs an older man who's already standing
in line -- it's Nathaniel Williams Sr., John Jr.'s maternal
grandfather, the very person Thompson had just been talking
about. The older man says that he had kept everything that had
been written on Thompson's case. Over the years, those articles
grew into a big pile of clippings.
Thompson walks out of Church's and gestures toward Williams,
who is driving away. "That's a man to me," says Thompson. He
believes that Williams deserves a lot of the credit for the
success of John Jr., who graduated from high school and is now,
at age 22, studying to be a graphic artist.
Earlier that day, while sitting at his desk, Thompson had
opened a manila envelope and inserted a money order and some
snapshots of the family and of his new white pit bull, Snow.
He then addressed it to his older son, who's serving time in
OPP for a probation violation on a cocaine-possession charge.
Several years earlier, Dedric had dropped out of school and
then got caught up. "I was Dedric's only hope," says Thompson
regretfully. When he thinks about the things he missed out on
while he sat on death row, this is at the top of his list.
This weekend morning, more than 20 volunteers are pounding
nails, sawing wood and raising roof trusses on a Habitat for
Humanity house. On the far side of the house stands a couple,
working side by side. The man is about a head taller than the
woman, who's petite with dark brown eyes.
Like all of the people working on the house, they wear name
tags made from pieces of gray duct tape scrawled with pen. His
reads "JT"; hers reads "Laverne." When the house is finished
next month, it will be theirs.
At the end of each day, the volunteers -- visiting conventioneers
from the American College of Real Estate Lawyers -- are given
pencils to write their good wishes onto their work. "From my
family to yours," reads one beam. "With all good luck. We are
privileged to help," reads another.
A few months ago, Thompson says, a network television interviewer
talked to him but seemed disappointed. "She wanted to know how
hard it is when a person gets out," he says. "And I couldn't
give her that."
"A lot of guys who have been exonerated are certainly not
doing well," says Nick Trenticosta, an attorney for the local
Center for Equal Justice who began working on Thompson's case
in 1988. "John is 41 and he spent 18 years -- almost half his
life -- on death row. But he's doing well. He's very healthy,
mentally. And he's also got incredible support that a lot of
guys who are exonerated don't have."
This new house, for instance. Then there's his wife, his steady
job, and his church.
Laverne and John Thompson first met when they attended what
was then McDonogh 36 Elementary School, at Freret and Josephine
streets. After John was released in May, Laverne wrote down
her phone number and handed it to his mother at church. They
exchanged vows on June 25 -- the first marriage for them both.
Thompson says that Laverne, who's endured some tough times of
her own, helps keep him on solid footing.
Thompson feels like he has another key advantage -- he never
had to look for work. "I had this job right off the bat," he
says. He arrived home on a Friday and by that Monday was working
as a paralegal at the Center for Equal Justice, which currently
represents about 15 of Thompson's former colleagues on Louisiana's
death row. Attorney Paula Montoye, Thompson's supervisor, is
writing her dissertation on his case. "He's a walking miracle,"
she says.
But even a miracle needs some inspiration. Tonight, after
stopping at Church's Chicken, Thompson will meet Laverne outside
of her workplace, the Uptown location of the Greater St. Stephen
Full Gospel Baptist Church. As hundreds of men walk by, carrying
their Bibles, the Thompsons sit in the car and share three pieces
of chicken and some fries. Then they head inside.
Joining this church, Thompson says, was one of the wisest
moves he's made. "Besides marrying my wife," he says, pulling
her close and kissing her on the forehead.
It's "Men of Vision" night, and so Laverne and the handful
of other women are asked to worship from the balcony. Downstairs,
Thompson stands a few rows from the front, next to his old next-door
neighbor James Wise, who used to run with Thompson on less holy
pursuits but is now a minister at a local church.
Behind the pulpit, way up in the choir stand, are several
men in light-green Orleans Parish Prison uniforms -- they're
the men from Voices of Thunder, OPP's gospel group. During one
song's introduction, the inmates compare the iron bars that
imprison them with the difficulties that everyone faces.
Thompson felt that message hit home. "I was right there with
them," he says afterward. He stands outside the church, putting
up his hood to guard against the cold, wet wind. "I am still
struggling," he says. "I'm still struggling every day."
When Thompson first arrived at death row, he remembers being
hot-headed, thinking that, no matter what he did, the state
of Louisiana was going to kill him anyway. Then, a few years
later, death-row prisoners were put into the same building as
the group of solitary-confinement inmates, who are kept in their
cells for 23 hours a day. In that group was Angola 3 inmate
Robert King Wilkerson -- known as King.
Wilkerson advised the young hothead to cool it. "King said,
'No -- you ain't going to get nowhere with that,'" says Thompson.
"He said, 'You use that ink pen, use that pencil.'"
Wilkerson was released in 2001. For his part, Thompson took
Wilkerson's advice. He wrote letters, attempting to get politically
powerful people involved in his case. He sent packages about
his case to legislators and to the ministers of all the big
churches -- no response.
So Thompson decided to seek lawyers from out of town. In 1988,
he hooked up with Trenticosta at the Loyola Death Penalty Resource
Center, the predecessor to the Equal Justice Center. Trenticosta
connected Thompson with Michael Banks and Gordon Cooney Jr.,
two attorneys from Philadelphia. They worked on his case until
he was acquitted this spring.
Now, Thompson's office at the Center for Equal Justice is
stacked full of cardboard bankers' boxes containing legal files.
Each box is labeled by thick black magic marker with the name
of a Center client.
On the wall in the next room is an astonishing photograph.
In it, former assistant district attorney Jim Williams stands
behind a desk, displaying a miniature electric chair pasted
with six little faces, each one representing a person that Williams
helped to put on death row. One of those faces is Thompson's
-- he points at his dated mugshot and then goes through the
list of other faces pasted to the mini-chair. Today, not one
of the men pictured remains on death row -- all of them have
either been exonerated or given a life sentence.
The photograph is good visual support for Thompson's belief
that the pursuit of the death penalty is less about guilt or
innocence and more about politics. As someone who was accused
and then convicted of killing a high-profile New Orleans citizen,
he says, he felt this pressure first-hand.
Public support for the death penalty has been dwindling in
recent years. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage
of people who say they favor the death penalty has dropped from
78 percent in June 1996 to 64 percent in July 2003. Analysts
say that this drop has a lot to do with the growing number of
exonerated death-row inmates, people like John Thompson.
Still, many inmates leave and find that, in their state --
like in Louisiana -- there's no reimbursement for wrongful convictions.
And district attorneys in this state, as in many others, have
immunity from lawsuits.
This week, John and Laverne Thompson will be at the Saenger Theatre,
attending a performance of the hit play The Exonerated,
which tells the story of six wrongly convicted death-row inmates.
Thompson says that, first of all, he'll be watching for authenticity.
The movies Dead Man Walking and Green Mile were
good, he says, but he's never seen anything that truly captures
the experience of being on death row.
But Thompson says he's as interested in the action off-stage,
the reaction of the audience. "Because people have heard about
your case and my case and everybody else's case -- but they
haven't changed their mind about the death penalty," he says.
It's something he can't figure out.
In New York, TV news cameras asked theater-goers whether the
play had changed their opinion about the death penalty. If cameras
appear outside the Saenger this week, Thompson says, he just
plans to be standing back, listening.
Other Stories This Week in Features:
Cover Story
Six Months Out
Truth to Tell
Frequently
Asked Questions
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Health Talk
Health News
The Mackie Report
More Ways to Care
Blake Pontchartrain™
New Orleans Know-It-All
Other Stories by Katy Reckdahl:
News Feature 10 28 03
News Feature 10 14 03
A&E Feature 10 14 03
Katy Reckdahl Archives
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