Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 2011

Connick v. Thompson

179 L. Ed. 2d 417 | 2011 U.S. LEXIS 2594 | 131 S. Ct. 1350 | 563 U.S. 51 | 22 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 887 | 79 U.S.L.W. 4195

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Takeaway

In short, Connick sharply limits §1983 failure-to-train liability for prosecutorial Brady violations: absent a pattern of closely similar violations or an exceptionally obvious need for training, a single violation does not establish municipal deliberate indifference.

Background

In 1985, John Thompson was charged with murder and, after publicity surrounding that charge, was also charged with an unrelated attempted armed robbery. During the robbery investigation, police recovered a bloodstained swatch from a victim's clothing. A crime-lab report received by the prosecution two days before trial showed that the perpetrator had type B blood. The report and swatch were not disclosed to Thompson. Thompson was convicted of attempted armed robbery.

That conviction affected Thompson's later murder trial: he chose not to testify because the robbery conviction could be used to impeach him. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Fourteen years later, shortly before his scheduled execution, Thompson's investigator found the undisclosed lab report. Testing established that Thompson had type O blood, so he could not have been the robber. The robbery conviction was vacated, the murder conviction was reversed because the robbery conviction had deprived Thompson of his right to testify, and a jury acquitted him at his retrial for murder.

Thompson then brought a §1983 action against Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick in his official capacity. Connick conceded that the failure to disclose the lab report violated Brady v. Maryland. A jury rejected Thompson's claim that the office had an unconstitutional policy, practice, or custom, but found that the office had deliberately failed to train its prosecutors concerning Brady and awarded $14 million. The District Court denied Connick judgment as a matter of law, and the Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, divided evenly, leaving the judgment intact.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether a district attorney's office may be held liable under §1983 for failure to train prosecutors based on a single Brady violation without proof of a pattern of similar violations.

Holding

No. Thompson did not establish that Connick was deliberately indifferent to a known or obvious need for additional Brady training.

Reasoning

A municipality is liable under §1983 only for its own unconstitutional policies or customs, not under respondeat superior for its employees' misconduct. A failure to train can qualify as municipal policy only when the failure reflects deliberate indifference to constitutional rights and actually causes the injury. Deliberate indifference is a demanding standard: the policymaker must disregard a known or obvious consequence of the training decision.

Ordinarily, a plaintiff proves deliberate indifference through a pattern of similar constitutional violations by untrained employees. Such a pattern puts the policymaker on actual or constructive notice that the existing training is deficient in a particular way. Without that notice, retaining the program ordinarily cannot be treated as a conscious municipal choice to cause constitutional violations.

Thompson did not identify a pattern of similar Brady violations. Four prior Louisiana convictions had been reversed for Brady violations by prosecutors in Connick's office, but none involved undisclosed blood evidence, crime-lab reports, or physical or scientific evidence. Those cases therefore did not give Connick notice of a need to train prosecutors specifically to avoid the nondisclosure that occurred in Thompson's robbery case.

Issue #2

Whether the alleged lack of Brady-specific training fell within the narrow 'single-incident' exception to the usual pattern requirement.

Holding

No. The need for specialized Brady training was not so obvious, and a Brady violation without it was not so highly predictable, that Connick's inaction itself amounted to deliberate indifference.

Reasoning

City of Canton left open a narrow single-incident theory where the need for training is patently obvious, illustrated by a city that arms police officers and sends them to arrest fleeing felons without training them on constitutional limits governing deadly force. In that setting, officers predictably confront life-or-death situations, lack legal training, and have no practical way to acquire the necessary constitutional knowledge without instruction.

The Court found prosecutors materially different from the hypothetical untrained police officers. Licensed attorneys receive legal education, must meet bar-admission and professional-responsibility requirements, are trained to locate and apply legal rules, and are ethically bound to disclose Brady material. Connick could rely on those professional tools and obligations unless a specific reason, such as a pattern of comparable violations, showed they were inadequate.

Moreover, the prosecutors were undisputedly familiar with Brady's general requirement to disclose favorable evidence. Thompson's argument was thus not that prosecutors had no ability to address constitutional questions, but that they lacked instruction on a particular and nuanced Brady problem. The possibility that more tailored training could have helped prosecutors make a difficult decision does not establish that a constitutional violation was a highly predictable consequence of the training program.

Because Thompson failed to prove deliberate indifference, the Court did not reach whether the asserted training deficiency was the moving force that actually caused the nondisclosure. The Court reversed the Fifth Circuit and held that Connick was entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

Concurrences

Justice Scalia

Reasoning

Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Alito, agreed fully with the Court but emphasized that Thompson's theory would improperly turn ordinary prosecutorial errors into municipal liability. Prosecutors regularly confront constitutional issues involving warrants, peremptory challenges, hearsay, and closing arguments; the mere inevitability of occasional mistakes in recurring work cannot make a municipality liable whenever it lacks training on the precise issue involved.

He rejected the dissent's reliance on evidence suggesting a broader office culture of Brady noncompliance. In his view, the legal question was narrower: whether a single Brady violation, without prior similar violations placing the office on notice, fits Canton’s rare single-incident exception. Evidence about later manuals or general misunderstandings did not establish that the need for particular training on this violation was obvious beforehand.

Justice Scalia also stressed causation. The evidence strongly suggested that prosecutor Gerry Deegan intentionally suppressed evidence he understood to be exculpatory. If so, Deegan's deliberate misconduct—not an absence of additional legal instruction—was the moving force behind the violation. And if the other prosecutors acted in good faith, Scalia reasoned, it was unclear what legally accurate training could have required disclosure of untested evidence whose exculpatory value was not yet known.

Dissents

Justice Ginsburg

Reasoning

Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, viewed Thompson's case not as an isolated error but as evidence of a persistent officewide disregard of Brady. She recounted multiple alleged suppressions during the robbery and murder prosecutions, including the blood evidence, witness-description reports, recordings concerning a reward-seeking witness, and police reports useful for impeachment. In her view, the evidence allowed a jury to find that Brady violations were standard operating procedure rather than the work of one rogue prosecutor.

The dissent maintained that Connick and senior prosecutors displayed fundamental misunderstandings of Brady. Testimony indicated that office leaders did not understand that impeachment evidence must be disclosed, believed prosecutors could rely on police to identify favorable information, and treated the lab report as non-Brady material because they did not know Thompson's blood type. Those misunderstandings, the dissent argued, supported a finding that the deficient training and supervision actually contributed to the nondisclosures.

Justice Ginsburg also stressed the office's lack of meaningful Brady instruction or monitoring. The office had high turnover, hired relatively inexperienced lawyers, promoted them quickly, provided no recalled Brady training, and supplied only sparse and inaccurate written guidance. Connick himself had stopped reading legal authorities after becoming district attorney, did not ensure that supervisors understood Brady, and never disciplined a prosecutor for a Brady violation. A jury could reasonably regard this as deliberate indifference to an obvious risk.

In the dissent's view, Canton does not require prior similar violations in every failure-to-train case. A single incident may suffice when employees repeatedly face a recurring constitutional question, the choice is difficult, and an erroneous choice predictably deprives people of constitutional rights. Prosecutors routinely make Brady decisions, and Brady violations are especially dangerous because suppressed evidence is often beyond a defendant's ability to discover. The jury could therefore find that basic, accurate Brady training and supervision were obviously necessary.

The dissent would have deferred to the jury's verdict, which was supported by evidence that proper training and monitoring would more likely than not have led at least one of the prosecutors to disclose the blood evidence. It would have affirmed the Fifth Circuit's judgment sustaining Thompson's damages award.