Connick v. Thompson
The Supreme Court ruled that a district attorney's office cannot be held liable for failing to train its prosecutors based on a single violation of a defendant's right to see favorable evidence, even though prosecutors in that office had hidden a crime lab report that helped prove a man's innocence.
The decision makes it much harder for people wrongly convicted because of hidden evidence to collect damages from the local government office responsible, unless they can show a repeated pattern of similar violations rather than just one bad outcome.
How it got here: A jury awarded Thompson $14 million; the Fifth Circuit affirmed by an evenly divided en banc court; the district attorney's office asked the Supreme Court to review.
The Case in Depth
What happened
John Thompson was convicted of attempted armed robbery and then, unable to testify at his own murder trial because of that conviction, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Years later, an investigator found a crime lab report proving the blood on evidence wasn't Thompson's, and both convictions were thrown out. He then sued the New Orleans district attorney's office for failing to train prosecutors on their duty to disclose favorable evidence.
The question before the Court
After prosecutors hid evidence that helped clear a wrongly convicted man, could the district attorney's office be sued for failing to train prosecutors, based on just that one violation?
Why it matters
People who are wrongly convicted because prosecutors hid evidence will find it much harder to sue the district attorney's office for money damages unless they can point to a pattern of similar violations. This raises the practical bar for holding local prosecutors' offices financially accountable for withheld-evidence errors, even severe ones.
What changes now
This is a final merits decision reversing the jury verdict and damages award in Thompson's favor; no further proceedings are ordered on this claim. The ruling does not disturb the underlying fact that prosecutors violated Thompson's rights — that was conceded — but it forecloses this route to holding the district attorney's office financially responsible. Future plaintiffs bringing similar failure-to-train claims against prosecutors will generally need to show a pattern of past violations.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether a Brady violation occurred in the broader sense the dissent argued (multiple pieces of withheld evidence) — it addressed only the conceded failure to disclose the crime lab report. It also left open that some other 'specific reason' short of a pattern of violations might still establish deliberate indifference in other cases.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Scalia
Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Alito, agreed fully with the majority but wrote to rebut the dissent point by point, arguing the dissent's focus on the trial record was irrelevant to the narrow legal question presented. He argued Thompson's theory would effectively erase the distinction between failure-to-train liability and blanket municipal liability, and separately argued causation was lacking because the withholding was most likely due to one rogue prosecutor's willful misconduct, not any training gap.
Dissent — Justice Ginsburg
“What happened here, the Court’s opinion obscures, was no momentary oversight, no single incident of a lone officer’s misconduct.”The dissent's central objection that the violations reflected a pervasive pattern, not an isolated mistake.
Justice Ginsburg, joined by three other justices, argued the trial evidence showed pervasive, office-wide misunderstanding of disclosure obligations among multiple leaders and prosecutors, not a single isolated mistake, and that this pattern of confusion and inattention was itself sufficient evidence of deliberate indifference. She would have upheld the jury's verdict, arguing the majority understated the scope and repetition of the violations and wrongly required a rigid prior-pattern showing not found in the statute's text.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- To hold a local government liable under the federal civil rights statute, a plaintiff must show the violation resulted from an official policy, not just an employee's individual misconduct — this includes a policymaker's failure to train employees, but only if that failure amounts to 'deliberate indifference,' a demanding standard requiring proof the policymaker ignored a known or obvious risk of constitutional violations.
- Ordinarily, showing deliberate indifference in a failure-to-train claim requires proof of a pattern of similar violations that put the policymaker on notice training was inadequate; Thompson did not show such a pattern, since the four prior reversals in Connick's office involved different types of evidence problems, not withheld physical or scientific evidence like the blood report.
- Thompson instead relied on a narrow exception the Court had floated in an earlier case, Canton v. Harris, for situations where a single violation is such an obvious and predictable result of the lack of training that no prior pattern is needed — illustrated by the hypothetical of arming police without any training on the constitutional limits of deadly force.
- The Court held that this narrow single-incident exception does not extend to prosecutors' disclosure obligations, because unlike untrained police recruits, attorneys already receive legal education, must pass licensing exams, face ongoing ethical duties, and train on the job with more experienced colleagues — so a lapse in formal in-house training doesn't make future violations 'highly predictable.'
- Because the prosecutors here were already generally familiar with the disclosure rule and only failed to apply it correctly in specific, nuanced circumstances, that kind of case-specific difficulty could not, by itself, prove the office's leadership disregarded an obvious risk.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Limits Canton v. Harris (489 U. S. 378)
Narrowed Canton's hypothetical single-incident liability exception to exclude prosecutors' Brady training failures.
Reaffirms Bryan Cty. v. Brown (520 U. S. 397)
Relied on this case's rule that a pattern of violations is ordinarily necessary to prove deliberate indifference.