Connick v. Thompson
The Supreme Court ruled that a New Orleans district attorney's office could not be held liable for a single instance of prosecutors withholding evidence favorable to a man later cleared of murder, because he had not shown a pattern of similar violations that would put the office on notice its training was inadequate.
The decision makes it substantially harder for people wrongly convicted because prosecutors hid evidence to win money damages from the government office that employed those prosecutors, even when the misconduct contributed to years of wrongful imprisonment.
How it got here: A jury awarded Thompson $14 million against the district attorney's office; an evenly divided en banc Fifth Circuit affirmed, and the Supreme Court agreed to review the failure-to-train ruling.
The Case in Depth
What happened
John Thompson was convicted of attempted armed robbery and then, because that conviction kept him from testifying, of murder, receiving a death sentence. Investigators later found that prosecutors had hidden a crime lab report showing his blood type didn't match the perpetrator's. Both convictions were overturned after 18 years, 14 of them on death row, and Thompson was acquitted at a retrial for murder. He then sued the district attorney's office for failing to train prosecutors on their disclosure duties.
The question before the Court
Could a district attorney's office be sued for failing to train its prosecutors, based on just one instance of prosecutors withholding evidence favorable to a defendant?
Why it matters
People who are wrongly convicted because prosecutors concealed favorable evidence will find it much harder to collect damages from the prosecutor's office itself unless they can show a repeated pattern of similar misconduct. This shifts the practical burden of preventing such violations onto individual attorneys' legal training and ethics rather than mandatory office-wide programs enforced through lawsuits.
What changes now
The ruling is a final decision on the merits, reversing the jury's $14 million damages award against the district attorney's office. Thompson does not recover money for his wrongful imprisonment under this theory, and there is no remand for further proceedings on the training claim. The decision leaves in place the higher bar future plaintiffs face in proving failure-to-train claims against prosecutors' offices without evidence of a prior pattern of similar violations.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide that Thompson's Brady rights weren't violated—the office had already conceded that. It also left open that something short of a full pattern of prior violations might, in some other case, still show a district attorney had specific notice that training was inadequate; it simply found no such showing here.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Scalia
Justice Scalia joined the majority in full but wrote separately to argue the dissent's extensive factual discussion was irrelevant to the narrow legal question presented. He argued Thompson's own theory of liability at trial would have effectively imposed automatic liability for any recurring type of prosecutorial error, contrary to the Court's precedent limiting municipal liability, and that the withholding was most likely caused by one prosecutor's willful misconduct rather than any training gap.
Dissent — Justice Ginsburg
“Had Brady’s importance been brought home to prosecutors, surely at least one of the four officers who knew of the swatch and lab report would have revealed their existence to defense counsel and the court.”Arguing the office's inadequate training directly caused the concealment of exculpatory evidence.
Justice Ginsburg argued the trial evidence showed pervasive, long-running misunderstanding of Brady duties throughout the district attorney's office, including by the district attorney himself, not an isolated mistake by one prosecutor. She contended the office provided no meaningful Brady training despite promoting inexperienced lawyers quickly, and that this evidence satisfied the deliberate-indifference standard without needing a prior pattern of identical violations. She would have upheld the jury's verdict for Thompson.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the framework for suing local governments under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, under which a government office can only be held liable for its own policies or practices, not simply for an employee's misconduct (no vicarious liability), and a failure to train can count as such a policy only when it reflects 'deliberate indifference' — a demanding standard requiring proof the office ignored a known or obvious risk.
- The Court explained that this deliberate-indifference standard ordinarily requires showing a pattern of similar past violations that would have put the office's leadership on notice its training was deficient, because without such notice, an office cannot be said to have consciously chosen a training program that would cause constitutional violations.
- The Court considered a narrow exception recognized in an earlier case (Canton v. Harris) allowing liability from a single incident when the need for training is so obvious that a violation is highly predictable — illustrated by a hypothetical city that arms police officers without teaching them the constitutional limits on deadly force.
- The Court concluded that this single-incident exception does not extend to training prosecutors on their evidence-disclosure duties, reasoning that unlike police recruits, licensed attorneys already receive legal education, must pass ethics and competency requirements, and are personally bound by professional obligations to know and follow disclosure rules.
- Because attorneys are equipped with tools to research and interpret legal requirements on their own, the Court held that a district attorney could reasonably rely on prosecutors' professional training and ethical duties absent specific notice—such as a pattern of violations—that this reliance was misplaced.
- Applying that reasoning, the Court found that four earlier reversals in the office involved different types of evidence, so they could not have alerted the district attorney to a need for training on this particular kind of disclosure, meaning deliberate indifference was not established.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Limits Canton v. Harris (489 U.S. 378)
Holds that Canton's narrow single-incident liability exception does not cover failure to train prosecutors on Brady obligations.
Reaffirms Monell (436 U.S. 658)
Reaffirms that local governments are not vicariously liable under § 1983 for employees' actions.
Reaffirms Board of Comm'rs of Bryan Cty. v. Brown (520 U.S. 397)
Reaffirms that a pattern of similar violations is ordinarily necessary to prove deliberate indifference in failure-to-train claims.