Harry Connick Sr., pictured in 2001, who was New Orleans’ district attorney for three decades, died on Jan. 24, 2024. Credit: Bill Haber / AP File Photo
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Last week, Harry Connick Sr. died at age 97. For 30 years of his life, he was the elected district attorney of Orleans Parish. In this professional role, he had ultimate responsibility for what the prosecutors on his staff did.
His staff repeatedly sent innocent people to prison or to death row.
The National Registry of Exonerations reports that New Orleans has the highest wrongful conviction rate in the country. It reports 32 recognized exonerations of people prosecuted by Connick’s office. Four of these people were sentenced to death, 23 to life without parole, one to indefinite detention in a state mental health institution, and the remainder to sentences of 35 years or more. These people served more than seven centuries of wrongful imprisonment. In 84% of the overturned convictions, prosecutors are known to have unlawfully withheld evidence; 97% of the people were Black.
The numbers do not capture the true horror of what Connick’s staff inflicted on people. In 1999, John Thompson, who had already survived six execution dates, was told that he was to be executed the day before his son was to graduate high school. Only an eleventh-hour investigative miracle by his defense team saved his life and secured his exoneration.
Jerome Morgan spent his formative teenage years in punitive lockdown because he would not pick cotton fast enough to satisfy the guards at Angola, the converted slave plantation where he was being punished despite being innocent.
Robert Jones’s partner was pregnant when Connick’s team began prosecuting him for crimes he did not commit. He did not get to even hold his youngest daughter outside of a prison until she was a month from her 23rd birthday.
These vignettes are just slivers of the experiences of just three of the people wrongfully convicted on Connick’s watch.
Even worse, in relative terms, the wrongfully convicted people who we know about are the lucky ones. Exonerating someone often takes an incredible combination of effort, time and good fortune. How many more innocent people are still in Angola from the Connick years? How many have completed a sentence and are left trying to build a life without the relief and vindication of exoneration? Worst of all, how many died in prison being punished for crimes they did not do?
Connick did not train his staff on their obligation to disclose evidence that was favorable to the defense as he was required to do under the law. He did not set policies to ensure his prosecutors found and disclosed such evidence. He did not discipline staff who were caught hiding evidence and, instead, covered for them. When an idealistic young prosecutor wished to present possible charges against the prosecutors responsible for a wrongful conviction to a grand jury, Connick terminated the grand jury because it made his “job more difficult,” leading to the junior prosecutor’s resignation.
For 30 years, Connick tolerated a staff that had no sense of responsibility for the rights of the people they prosecuted and did not see them as people. How else can you describe an office where one prosecutor gave the office’s death penalty specialist, Jim Williams, a working toy electric chair as a gag gift and then Jim Williams displayed it on his desk with the faces of the Black men he had sentenced to death taped to it? Men taped to the chair included innocent people who were later exonerated based on evidence that had unlawfully been hidden by law enforcement.
While the people of New Orleans have paid out over $10 million to defend and settle cases of people wrongfully convicted by Connick’s office, he never faced consequences for his choices. He never demonstrated any interest in conducting an office-wide review to examine what caused a wrongful conviction and how to prevent similar, horrific outcomes from recurring in the future. His hubris harmed the city and its citizens he was elected to serve.
As the New York Times recently reported, while Connick’s staff wrongfully convicted people in New Orleans, “crime remained high, the city’s economy declined and its population ebbed and grew poorer.” Connick defended his legacy and has been quoted as describing these wrongful convictions as like the strikeouts in the careers of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. His cavalier comparison of sending an innocent person to die in prison with strikeouts at a baseball game shows how he viewed prosecution as just that — a game that he intended to win at all costs.
The U.S. Supreme Court declared nearly 89 years ago that a prosecutor’s interest “in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. … He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor—indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones.”
Connick’s strikeouts destroyed the lives of the falsely accused and convicted, and their families. That is his legacy.
By all accounts, in his personal life Harry Connick Sr. was a kind man who loved and was loved by his friends and family.
But so were the innocent people who he sent to prison to die.
Jee Park has served as IPNO’s executive director since June 2018. Prior to joining IPNO in January 2017 as the senior attorney for policy, Jee served as the deputy district defender of Orleans Public Defenders (OPD) from 2014-16. She joined OPD in the spring of 2008 as a supervising attorney then directed OPD’s Special Litigation Division from 2009-14. Prior to OPD, Jee worked as a staff attorney at The Bronx Defenders in New York and was a Prettyman Fellow at the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center.
Richard Davis came to IPNO for a four-month internship in 2005 and has remained ever since. Ricahrd obtained a Bachelor of Law degree from the University of Sheffield in 2004. He obtained his Master of Law degree from Loyola University New Orleans in 2011 while working at Innocence Project New Orleans.
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Harry Connick: A legacy of injustice
by Jee Park and Richard Davis, Verite News New Orleans February 1, 2024
Harry Connick: A legacy of injustice
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Everyone deserves access to quality information. Sign up for our free newsletters.
Last week, Harry Connick Sr. died at age 97. For 30 years of his life, he was the elected district attorney of Orleans Parish. In this professional role, he had ultimate responsibility for what the prosecutors on his staff did.
His staff repeatedly sent innocent people to prison or to death row.
The National Registry of Exonerations reports that New Orleans has the highest wrongful conviction rate in the country. It reports 32 recognized exonerations of people prosecuted by Connick’s office. Four of these people were sentenced to death, 23 to life without parole, one to indefinite detention in a state mental health institution, and the remainder to sentences of 35 years or more. These people served more than seven centuries of wrongful imprisonment. In 84% of the overturned convictions, prosecutors are known to have unlawfully withheld evidence; 97% of the people were Black.
The numbers do not capture the true horror of what Connick’s staff inflicted on people. In 1999, John Thompson, who had already survived six execution dates, was told that he was to be executed the day before his son was to graduate high school. Only an eleventh-hour investigative miracle by his defense team saved his life and secured his exoneration.
Jerome Morgan spent his formative teenage years in punitive lockdown because he would not pick cotton fast enough to satisfy the guards at Angola, the converted slave plantation where he was being punished despite being innocent.
Robert Jones’s partner was pregnant when Connick’s team began prosecuting him for crimes he did not commit. He did not get to even hold his youngest daughter outside of a prison until she was a month from her 23rd birthday.
These vignettes are just slivers of the experiences of just three of the people wrongfully convicted on Connick’s watch.
Even worse, in relative terms, the wrongfully convicted people who we know about are the lucky ones. Exonerating someone often takes an incredible combination of effort, time and good fortune. How many more innocent people are still in Angola from the Connick years? How many have completed a sentence and are left trying to build a life without the relief and vindication of exoneration? Worst of all, how many died in prison being punished for crimes they did not do?
Connick did not train his staff on their obligation to disclose evidence that was favorable to the defense as he was required to do under the law. He did not set policies to ensure his prosecutors found and disclosed such evidence. He did not discipline staff who were caught hiding evidence and, instead, covered for them. When an idealistic young prosecutor wished to present possible charges against the prosecutors responsible for a wrongful conviction to a grand jury, Connick terminated the grand jury because it made his “job more difficult,” leading to the junior prosecutor’s resignation.
For 30 years, Connick tolerated a staff that had no sense of responsibility for the rights of the people they prosecuted and did not see them as people. How else can you describe an office where one prosecutor gave the office’s death penalty specialist, Jim Williams, a working toy electric chair as a gag gift and then Jim Williams displayed it on his desk with the faces of the Black men he had sentenced to death taped to it? Men taped to the chair included innocent people who were later exonerated based on evidence that had unlawfully been hidden by law enforcement.
While the people of New Orleans have paid out over $10 million to defend and settle cases of people wrongfully convicted by Connick’s office, he never faced consequences for his choices. He never demonstrated any interest in conducting an office-wide review to examine what caused a wrongful conviction and how to prevent similar, horrific outcomes from recurring in the future. His hubris harmed the city and its citizens he was elected to serve.
As the New York Times recently reported, while Connick’s staff wrongfully convicted people in New Orleans, “crime remained high, the city’s economy declined and its population ebbed and grew poorer.” Connick defended his legacy and has been quoted as describing these wrongful convictions as like the strikeouts in the careers of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. His cavalier comparison of sending an innocent person to die in prison with strikeouts at a baseball game shows how he viewed prosecution as just that — a game that he intended to win at all costs.
The U.S. Supreme Court declared nearly 89 years ago that a prosecutor’s interest “in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. … He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor—indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones.”
Connick’s strikeouts destroyed the lives of the falsely accused and convicted, and their families. That is his legacy.
By all accounts, in his personal life Harry Connick Sr. was a kind man who loved and was loved by his friends and family.
But so were the innocent people who he sent to prison to die.
Jee Park has served as IPNO’s executive director since June 2018. Prior to joining IPNO in January 2017 as the senior attorney for policy, Jee served as the deputy district defender of Orleans Public Defenders (OPD) from 2014-16. She joined OPD in the spring of 2008 as a supervising attorney then directed OPD’s Special Litigation Division from 2009-14. Prior to OPD, Jee worked as a staff attorney at The Bronx Defenders in New York and was a Prettyman Fellow at the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center.
Richard Davis came to IPNO for a four-month internship in 2005 and has remained ever since. Ricahrd obtained a Bachelor of Law degree from the University of Sheffield in 2004. He obtained his Master of Law degree from Loyola University New Orleans in 2011 while working at Innocence Project New Orleans.
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