John Thompson spent 17 years in Louisiana prisons, 14 of them on death row, after prosecutors withheld blood evidence that would have cleared him. In this session from Stephen Bright's Yale course on capital punishment, Thompson recounts his prosecution, his eventual exoneration, and the civil suit he won against the Orleans Parish district attorney's office, a 14 million dollar jury verdict that the Supreme Court later overturned in Connick v. Thompson. He describes what it was like to await execution for a crime he did not commit and what changed, and did not change, once he was released. The interview format keeps the focus on his own account of the system's failures, from withheld exculpatory evidence to the limits of accountability for prosecutorial misconduct, rather than on courtroom argument or doctrine.