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Hi. My name is John Thompson. I'm 47 years old. I was born and raised in New Orleans,
Louisiana. I spent 28 years of my life in prison and when I came home there was not
too many things available to me, and the thought of trying to help someone else transition
smoothly like I did - I thought it was something that was d, and so we created Resurrection
After Exoneration. I was sentenced to death by electrocution
for the *** of an important man here in New Orleans. It was a *** that I didn't commit. It took
18 years for the truth to be revealed through DNA evidence and exculpatory evidence that
was withheld from the Police Dept. from the witnesses about the descriptions from witnesses
who ad actually seen or heard of evidence at the time of the crim e- it wasn't available
to my attorneys during my first trial. This information was made available to us
through a dying man's confession... the dying man who confessed was the prosecutor who prosecuted
me for a crime I didn't commit. The confession led to my release, after I spent 18 years
of my life in prison. I was exonerated in May 2003.
I work with exonerated guys - men who are returnign home from prison for crime that
they didnt do. I also work with guys who return from home period. What we do is try to help
them transition to life in society, which means roviding them withthe things that most
people take for granted: providing them with their social security cards, birth certificates,
getting ready for job interviews, finding hospitals that will treat them, or even, sometimes,
a place to live. That's what I do. I value family. I value friendship. I value
a word - a person that is able to stick with their word, I value a lot. They always say
talk is cheap, and so that s why I value word. You could tell a person,
you can learn a lot from a person by what they say out of their mouth, and what they
do - so those two things, I pay close attention to.
I value the relationship of a woman now. After spending I guess all them years in prison
without a woman, and looking at the relationships I had before I went to prison, I understood
how I was totally in disrespect of myself, and women, the way I viewed it at the age
of 22. I'm 47 now, so I needed to make sure that was one of the things that I corrected
in my life - it was the way I treated women. I ain't gonna say I understand them, I can
say I appreciate women more, and I have a deeper value and respect for women than I
did when I was a teenager.
In prison, when you're sentenced in prison - whether you're in there for a crime you
committed or not, the environment is not gonna change because you're innocent. So the environment
you're in, is what we would call, hostile. I'm thinking about Gregory Bright, an exoneree...
he described inside the prison as like, all the worst creatures that you could think about
- like [fictional horror movie monsters like] Freddy Krueger, Jason, Michael Meyers - all
these people that brought all this destruction upon us. And when you put a person in that
type of environment, you create a magnet that can protect yourself. So, being placed in
that environment with these characters in it, you have to create a character. You create
a character - you create that character not because you want to be tat character, you
develop that character because you want to protect yourself.
Being in such an environment for such a long period of time, it becomes first nature.
You done took someone that's a pope, and made him ... a Hitler. You couldn't put the Pope
inside an environment of this nature, and think he's going to come out that Pope, if
you leave him in that nature for 20 years. One of the biggest things that's happened
to us - why we have a recidivism rate so high - is because of that type of situation where
you're taking a situation where something is good, and putting it in a situation where
a bunch of things are bad. And then one day, out of nowhere, you're just released. And
to balance that, to be able to come back out after putting on that suit of armor to protect
yourself, and the rules and regulations... what it takes for me to survive in there,
is different from what it takes for me to survive out here in the free world.
That change, that turn-over is so un- ... it's not being addressed right... The right way
is not being weighed in on that... First of all, without a doubt, once an individual comes
out of that type of environment they need all the mental help or psychological help
they can get, right away. It's like an emergency. It should be first response: psychiatric help,
right away. There's no such thing as, "he's all right." How can he be all right, when
he's been living in a zoo? You know, you put him in a zoo with tigers and lions, and you
want him to be all right. That needed to be overcome by myself, too,
and it wasn't easy, and it's still not a done deal. It's a work in progress. There are some
things that I can identify as, "that's jailhouse," I gotta back up. Right now, I'm still calling
my living room the "day room" sometimes. Or say, "Go get that out of my cell," and I'm
talking to my wife, I'm talking about my bedroom. How you react to certain things in public
- I'm working in a professional capacity, but I have a tendency to in this professional
capacity - go into a jailhouse mood, because of something that can tick me, or make me
react, instead of now, knowing that I don't have to react. In prison, I HAD to react,
you know? So now, I can be happy and good, and have all the best news that could possibly
come to me, and yet a person could come with something that i think is trying to harm me
or hurt me in a way - not that it will actually hurt me out here, it would hurt me in prison
- but I become very offended, and it shuts me down from being who I really want to be.
Only close friends around me can really understand it, and a lot of other people become very
offended. So it's something that I identified that I know needs more nourishing.
I think working and understanding that one of the things we needed was psychological
help - being willing to go, willing to be that guinea pig... part of me being the director
here is, before I try to bring something to others to be serviced... I say, "Come with
me," using my real problem-solving techniques, things of that nature. This is how I went
about trying to find what works, for me. I can't say what worked for me will work for
the next person, but I went through accepting the fact that I might need to see a psychiatrist.
It was hard for me to accept that - something might be wrong with me, but I recognized that
something has to be wrong with me, because of what I've been through. So there weren't
"ifs" and "buts" about so I need to see this... I took that step: I had to see this. And through
visiting the psychiatrist, I was able to start pinpointing some of my faults, and through
that I was able to start thinking, how can I better some of them faults? And to this
day, I see a psychiatrist and I get an opportunity to deal with them hurdles that I'm still trying
to cross. But not everyone's going to be willing to
- and not every exoneree is willing to
sit down with a psychiatrist, and
so I try to say, "It's all right. I went and
talked
to one."