| Harry Connick, Sr. Esq. | |
|---|---|
| District Attorney of Orleans Parish | |
| In office 1973–2003 |
|
| Preceded by | Jim Garrison |
| Succeeded by | Eddie Jordan |
| Constituency | New Orleans, Louisiana |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1926 (age 85–86) |
| Nationality | American |
| Political party | Democratic Party (United States) |
| Spouse(s) | Anita Livingston Connick (died 1981); 2 children Londa Jean Matherne (19??-present) |
| Children | Harry, Jr.; Suzanna |
| Alma mater | Loyola University New Orleans undergraduate, Tulane University law school |
Joseph Harry Fowler Connick, Sr. (born 1926) is a New Orleans attorney who is best known for serving as the district attorney of the Parish of Orleans, which contains the City of New Orleans, from 1973 to 2003.
His son, Harry Connick, Jr. is a successful singer, pianist, actor, and humanitarian. The elder Connick is a singer, long performing a few nights a week at local clubs as a hobby. He has been outspoken on the use of narcotics and pressed for drug testing of high-school students. Since September 2003, he has also served on the board of directors for Psychemedics Corporation, a firm producing drug tests that use hair samples, rather than urine.
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After high school, he served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, he returned to New Orleans and graduated from Loyola University New Orleans with a degree in business administration.
He later joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a civilian employee where he met the woman who would become his wife, Anita Livingston (May 22, 1926 – July 1981), an accomplished flute player, who became a lawyer, judge and former Louisiana Supreme Court justice. She was one of the first female judges in the city of New Orleans. When Harry and Anita Connick returned to New Orleans, they opened a record store. Ultimately they owned two stores while simultaneously pursuing law degrees, one working in the store while the other was at school. They also had a daughter, Suzanna, and a son, Harry, Jr. Anita Connick died of ovarian cancer, aged 55, in 1981. A widower, Connick married, secondly, to Londa Jean Matherne. Connick is the uncle of Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick and State Representative Patrick Connick, also of Jefferson Parish.[1]
Connick served as an attorney for the New Orleans Legal Aid Bureau and as assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana. He was honored by the U.S. Attorney general for superior performance while an assistant U.S. attorney and by Louisiana State University for outstanding service in law enforcement training. He also served both as vice president and president of the Criminal Bar Association.
As District Attorney, he was the defendant and petitioner in Connick v. Myers, a free speech case in public employment law. In the case, Connick asked Sheila Myers to take a transfer to another position in his office. She had resisted, finally saying she would consider it after a meeting with Connick. Later the same day she distributed a questionnaire on issues of employee morale to her fellow prosecutors, after which Connick fired her.[2]
Myers sued in federal court alleging Connick violated her First Amendment rights by firing her. He maintained she had been fired for refusing the transfer, but judge Jack Gordon of the Eastern District of Louisiana held that the distribution of the questionnaire was speech on a matter of public concern and thus constitutionally protected. Since the facts indicated to him that Myers had been fired for it, he ordered her reinstated. After the Fifth Circuit affirmed Gordon, the Supreme Court granted certiorari and narrowly reversed the ruling, holding that Myers' questionnaire largely touched on matters internal to the office that were not of public concern and thus she was lawfully fired.[2]
In 1987, Connick waged an unsuccessful challenge to incumbent William J. "Billy" Guste, Jr. for the position of Louisiana Attorney General. Attorney Manuel "Manny" Fernandez was eliminated from the competition in the jungle primary, and Connick and Guste advanced to the Louisiana general election. Guste prevailed over Connick, 516,658 (54%) to 440,984 (46%). Both were registered Democrats, but in Louisiana a general election can feature two members of the same party.
In 1989, Connick and actor Paul Burke (NBC's Noah's Ark and ABC's former Naked City series) were indicted on racketeering charges for aiding and abetting a gambling operation by returning gambling records to an arrested gambler.[3] He and Burke were acquitted of all charges after a seven-week trial.
In 1995, while District Attorney, Connick promised to the Assassination Records Review Board and at a public meeting in New Orleans that he would donate the Garrison investigative files which were still in his office. While the Review Board was allowed to inventory the records in Connick's office but not immediately take them, a New Orleans TV station sent the Review Board a box full of original witness transcripts from Garrison's grand jury case. According to the Review Board's final report,[4]
Connick reportedly instructed one of his investigators to destroy these documents after he took office. The investigator took them home instead and kept them until he found out about the Review Board. A battle ensued between Connick and the Review Board after Connick demanded that the papers were returned to him and threatening to withhold the investigation papers. After many subpoenas going both ways and with the help of the Justice Department the Review Board won, and all of the documents in question are in the JFK Collection.
In 2003, Connick was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield.[5]
There are several allegations of systemic misconduct by Connick and his prosecutors. "According to the Innocence Project, a national organization that represents incarcerated criminals claiming innocence, 36 men convicted in Orleans Parish during Connick's 30-year tenure as DA have made allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, and 19 have had their sentences overturned or reduced as a result."[6]
In the case of Shareef Cousin, Connick and his assistants withheld a key witness statement from the defense, arguing that the prosecution were under no legal obligation to disclose such information.[7] As a result, Cousin was put on death row at the age of 16, but the conviction and death sentence was eventually overturned.
In 2007, a man named John Thompson, who was wrongfully convicted of murder by Connick's DA office due to evidence withholding, was awarded a $14 million verdict by a federal court jury. The jury found "that Thompson's 18 years behind bars (14 of which he spent in solitary confinement on death row) were caused by Connick's deliberate failure to train his prosecutors on their obligations to turn over exculpatory evidence".[8] The Orleans Parish DA's office appealed and the case, Connick v. Thompson, was orally argued before the U.S. Supreme Court during the October 2010 term. By a 5-4 vote split along ideological lines,[9] the Supreme Court overturned the $14 million award in a decision issued on March 29, 2011.[10] The majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, construed the series of admitted violations to not amount to a pattern of "similar" violations of Brady v. Maryland (1963), and such a pattern was necessary to hold Connick liable for the incompetence of his employees. The dissenting opinion, read from the bench by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, noted that Connick's office had in fact committed a pattern of violations, failing to disclose exculpatory blood type evidence, failing to disclose audio tapes of witness testimony, failing to disclose a deathbed confession of evidence destruction by the prosecuting attorney Gerry Deegan, and failing to disclose eyewitness identification of the killer that did not match Thompson. Ginsburg noted that the office had employee turnover so high a young attorney could advance to a senior supervisory position within four years, thus the office offered little training in ongoing developments in criminal procedure law despite its large number of inexperienced attorneys. Even at his 2007 trial, Connick admitted that he still did not completely understand Brady's holding.
| Legal offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Jim Garrison |
District Attorney, Orleans Parish, Louisiana 1973-2003 |
Succeeded by Eddie Jordan |