Harry Connick Sr., New Orleans D.A. Criticized for Overreach, Dies at 97
The city’s top prosecutor from 1973 to 2003, he led an office that sent hundreds of Black men to prison and became known for its record of wrongful convictions.
Harry Connick Sr., a long-serving district attorney in New Orleans whose office gained national notoriety for prosecutorial overreach that eventually resulted in many reversed convictions, died on Thursday at his home in New Orleans. He was 97.
His death was announced by his son, the singer Harry Connick Jr., in a statement.
The older Mr. Connick was a singer himself and became locally renowned for his nightclub performances in the French Quarter. But his national reputation as a district attorney was much darker, particularly after a 2011 dissent by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that blasted the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office, under his leadership, for singular incompetence and misconduct.
Justice Ginsburg found that Mr. Connick’s subordinates systematically hid evidence that could aid the defense, in violation of the Constitution. Mr. Connick, she said, had “created a tinderbox in Orleans Parish” in which violations of the defendant’s right to be given evidence were “nigh inevitable.”
The justice excoriated Mr. Connick for his “cavalier approach,” noting that he himself acknowledged that he had “stopped reading law books” and “looking at opinions” after first being elected in 1973.
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Louisiana has routinely had one of the world’s highest incarceration rates, and the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office bears much of the responsibility.
According to the Innocence Project of New Orleans, which works to free the wrongfully convicted, 32 of those convicted during Mr. Connick’s time in office, from 1973 to 2003, were “factually innocent” and later exonerated. In 27 of those cases there was prosecutorial misconduct by Mr. Connick’s assistants, the group’s director, Jee Park, said in an email.
New Orleans under Mr. Connick had “the highest known wrongful conviction rate in the world,” Ms. Park said. “I do not know of any other former or current district attorney in the country with such a devastating record.”
Race was at the heart of it. An overwhelming majority of those wrongfully convicted by Mr. Connick’s office, 96 percent, were Black, according to the Innocence Project.
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“You are in the South,” said Calvin Johnson, the former chief judge of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, who heard dozens of cases brought by Mr. Connick’s office in 17 years on the bench. “All that was happening, it was centered around race.”
Mr. Connick was “embedded in the attitudinal thing of prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law,” Mr. Johnson said in a phone interview — which meant, for instance, sending people to jail for 10 years for possessing marijuana.
The effect on New Orleans of all those prosecutions and convictions, over Mr. Connick’s decades in office, has been “absolutely horrific,” the former judge said. “You’ve had the traumatic impact of that,” he added. “New Orleans has not gotten over that.”
A genial man in person, Mr. Connick appeared nonplused in his later years over a reputation that had been severely tainted.
“Would you make it the legacy of Hank Aaron or Babe Ruth that they struck out a lot?” he asked in an interview with The Times-Picayune in 2012. “I have to look at myself and say this is who I am. This is what I’ve done. Perfect? No. But I’ve done nothing to go to confession about in that office. At all.”
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His sudden fall appeared to him all the more bewildering because, for years, he had been one of the city’s principal local power brokers. He was elected five times to six-year terms, mostly without difficulty, and his endorsement was eagerly sought by powerful politicians, Black and white, in New Orleans.
Yet his hands-off approach to the district attorney’s office had become proverbial. Even before he began a once-a-week stint at a French Quarter club, in imitation of his son’s blossoming international career, “Connick left the courtroom work to his assistants, an ill-paid, hard-driving group, mostly men, mostly white,” the journalist Jed Horne wrote in “Desire Street” (2005), a book about the case of Curtis Kyles, whose 1984 murder conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1995 because Mr. Connick’s assistants withheld evidence.
“The office locked up mostly Black men, mostly poor people, in ways that required them to hide the evidence they were supposed to disclose,” Denise LeBoeuf, a New Orleans lawyer, said in an interview. “It was under his watch. That will always be on him.”
Joseph Harry Fowler Connick was born on March 27, 1926, in Mobile, Ala., to James Connick, who was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Jessie (Fowler) Connick, a nurse. He grew up in New Orleans, where he attended parochial school.
After serving with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in World War II, he returned to New Orleans to attend Loyola University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, and Tulane University, where he earned a law degree.
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In 1973, after working as a federal prosecutor, he ran for district attorney in New Orleans against Jim Garrison, who had received national attention for his quixotic, and unsuccessful, attempt to prove a far-flung conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (That effort was the basis of the Oliver Stone movie “JFK.”)
For years, few in New Orleans questioned the hardball tactics of Mr. Connick and his prosecutors, even as crime remained high, the city’s economy declined and its population ebbed and grew poorer. He was even re-elected after being charged with racketeering by federal prosecutors in 1990, on allegations that he had returned betting records to a convicted bookmaker.
But his reputation began to change as local criminal defense lawyers started looking closely at several cases of young Black men his office had sent to death row.
The case that earned Justice Ginsburg’s wrath began in 1985, when 22-year-old John Thompson was arrested in a carjacking and murder in New Orleans. A person accused of being his accomplice implicated him. Convicted, Mr. Thompson spent 14 years on death row awaiting execution. Thirty days before he was scheduled to be executed, a private investigator hired by his lawyers found that the blood type of the carjacking perpetrator did not match Mr. Thompson’s. A former assistant district attorney admitted on his deathbed that he had withheld the evidence.
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That led to Mr. Thompson’s exoneration in the murder. He sued the district attorney’s office and was awarded $14 million by a jury in 2007. But that verdict was overturned in 2011 by a Supreme Court majority, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, which drew Justice Ginsburg’s strong dissent.
Mr. Thompson died in 2017. In an interview on Friday, his widow, Laverne Thompson, said, “He just wanted those who wronged him, in the Harry Connick era, to be held accountable,” adding that Mr. Connick’s office had never apologized.
“They never said they were wrong,” she said. “Apologizing would be admitting guilt.”
But there were other cases like Mr. Thompson’s, so many that a 2015 New York Times editorial asked, “How many constitutional violations will it take before the New Orleans district attorney’s office is held to account for the culture of negligence and outright dishonesty that has pervaded it for decades?”
In addition to his son, Mr. Connick is survived by his wife, Londa Jean (Matherne) Connick; his daughter, Dr. Suzanna Jamison; and four granddaughters.
Mr. Connick’s former assistants, in local news reports after his death, defended him vigorously. But others who had gone up against his office in court had a more muted reaction.
“Harry Connick endorsed a notion that the way to solve societal ills is to punish,” Ms. LeBoeuf said. “He was swept up in a wave that the best way is to prosecute to the max.”
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