Connick v. Thompson

Incident Summary & Facts

In 1985, Orleans Parish prosecutors charged John Thompson with murder. After publicity about that charge, the victims of an unrelated attempted armed robbery identified him as their attacker. A crime scene technician had cut a swatch of fabric stained with the robber’s blood from a victim’s pants. Two days before the robbery trial, the crime lab reported that the perpetrator had blood type B. The report was never disclosed to the defense, and the swatch was not mentioned at trial. Thompson was convicted of attempted armed robbery. Because of that conviction, he chose not to testify at his murder trial, and he was convicted and sentenced to death.

Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row. About a month before his scheduled 1999 execution, his investigator found the lab report. Thompson’s blood type is O. Both convictions were vacated, and he was acquitted of the murder on retrial. Thompson then sued District Attorney Harry Connick in his official capacity under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for failing to train prosecutors on their Brady v. Maryland disclosure duties. Connick conceded that a Brady violation occurred. A jury awarded $14 million, and an evenly divided en banc Fifth Circuit affirmed.

This case did not involve a use-of-force encounter. It concerns municipal liability for failure to train.

Core Legal Issue

Can a district attorney’s office be held liable under § 1983 for failure to train its prosecutors, based on a single Brady violation and without a pattern of similar violations?

The Holding

No. Reversed. Failure to train prosecutors on Brady does not fall within the narrow “single-incident” liability hypothesized in City of Canton v. Harris. Without a pattern of similar violations, Thompson could not prove deliberate indifference, and Connick was entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

The Court’s Analysis:

• No vicarious liability: Under Monell, local governments are liable only for “their own illegal acts,” not on a respondeat superior basis. A failure-to-train claim makes a municipality’s culpability “at its most tenuous.” It requires “deliberate indifference,” described as “a stringent standard of fault.”
• A pattern is “ordinarily necessary.” Policymakers must have actual or constructive notice that the training is deficient. The four earlier Brady reversals from Connick’s office did not involve blood evidence, crime lab reports, or any scientific evidence. Because they were not similar, they gave no notice.
• The Canton hypothetical is about armed police. The Court explained that Canton’s single-incident example involves a city that arms officers and sends them to capture fleeing felons without training on the constitutional limits of deadly force. “Armed police must sometimes make split-second decisions with life-or-death consequences,” and new officers have “no way” to learn the law without training. Attorneys, by contrast, are trained in law, licensed, and ethically bound to know Brady.
• Details of training are not enough. The prosecutors knew the general Brady rule. Showing that “additional training would have been helpful” does not establish liability.
• Concurrence (Scalia, J., joined by Alito, J.): Thompson’s theory “would repeal the law of Monell in favor of the Law of Large Numbers.” Causation also failed, because the likely “moving force” was one prosecutor’s willful suppression of evidence, not a gap in training.
• Dissent (Ginsburg, J., joined by Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, JJ.): The evidence showed that disregard of Brady was pervasive and that Connick was deliberately indifferent. The jury’s verdict should have stood.