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In 1985, John Thompson bought a second hand gun
from an acquaintance in New Orleans.
The gun had been used to *** a hotel executive
and John was later arrested in connection with the ***.
Before the trial his picture appeared in the press
and the victim of an unsolved carjacking claimed John was his attacker.
He was sent to prison for the armed robbery
and with a violent crime fresh on his record,
he was advised not to testify during his *** trial.
He was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Over the next 12 years, John survived 8 execution dates and exhausted all his appeals.
Then a private investigator found a sample of the carjacker's blood
that did not match John's.
And the prosecutor confessed to deliberately hiding this evidence during the trial.
John was acquitted of the carjacking
and granted a re-trial in the *** case.
In court, the new jury took just 35 minutes to clear him of the ***.
He had spent 18 years in prison,
14 of them on death row.
I was selling drugs and it became a part of the drug scene
where you buy stolen property from individuals.
I just happened to buy jewellery, from the dead man, and the gun
that they used to kill the dead man.
Basically, that's how I got entangled with the ***.
They wanted me for questioning.
I say, man, I say I don't know about any damn ***.
Yeah you know about it. No, I don't. No, I don't.
They put my picture in the newspaper the very next day.
Saying I'm the killer.
I know I ain't committed no ***.
I sure ain't committed no robbery.
Just chill out, be cool, it's gonna take its course, gonna take its place.
The DA decide to ask the judge to set my *** case back,
and let them pursue with this robbery case first.
The next thing he did to me
was physically throwing away the evidence.
The day of my trial, the physical evidence was taken out of evidence room
and never made it to the courtroom.
When the DA went to check that out in the evidence room,
he threw it away.
He never returned it or nothing.
So we never knew that it even existed.
He lied to the victims.
The head district attorney told that kid,
the physical evidence was inconclusive.
That's why we're not using it.
They lied.
I had 9 individuals to come to testify that I was at work,
at the time when this robbery took place.
Yet, they still convicted me,
gave me forty-nine and a half years.
That was the first step.
The next thing I know, I'm going to trial for ***.
They used all this false evidence, all this bad information
to really pursue the death penalty.
September the 1st, 1997 was the day I was shipped to death row.
They opened the cell that I was ready to go in,
I see some belongings, and this is a one-man cell.
That was my first day experience,
me going in the cell that the man had just been executed.
And all his belongings were still in the cell.
I didn't know how to accept that, man.
I was like, I was like traumatised, man.
The very next day, they brought me my first execution date.
I faced 8 execution dates myself.
I witnessed 12 different guys being executed.
Once you come out of the United States Supreme Court, the final court,
then everything is real.
You don't get no more chances.
So, my time started ticking.
I had one investigator to look at the robbery case.
When she opened up the transcript,
the first thing she sees is,
the request to have my blood withdrawn.
Then she realised, damn
they must have some kind of physical evidence that had blood on it.
This was 18 years later now that we?re discovering it.
Me and the perpetrator had a totally different type of blood.
With that, that was how I received my stay of execution.
Then as they dig further, they realised it led to
clear and convincing evidence, that there was a,
to me, a conspiracy, a monster group of district attorneys,
As well the judge who took away some physical evidence.
Where's the justice in that?
Where's the accountability in that?
You know, this is not, if this happened, it's happened.
You know, evidence where the district attorney signed,
used his name to sign
to get the evidence out of the evidence room,
the day of my trial.
It never was returned.
Why is he not prosecuted?
Why are we not looking at this as something serious enough to approach?
Prosecutors, they got immunity.
They can do all of these things and have immunity.
From any type of prosecution.
It's like why, what are they doing with us,
playing Russian roulette with our lives?
Our lives don't have no value
but their careers have value?
A career?
What you lost, you can't get back.
I think that's the hardest thing to deal with, period.
The fact that I lost 18 years. That was my youth.
They're doing something that they know it's wrong,
they know it's evil,
and the reward for doing that wrong and evil
is a greater authority, greater power.
That's scary.
As of May 2013, official misconduct had contributed to 44 percent of exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations.