Harry Connick Sr.

Joseph Harry Fowler Connick Sr. (born March 27, 1926),[1] is an American attorney who served 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 jazz singer, pianist, actor, and humanitarian. Connick Sr. is also a singer, long performing a few nights a week at local clubs as a hobby.

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	Joseph Harry Fowler Connick (1926-03-27) March 27, 1926 Mobile, Alabama, U.S.
Nationality	American
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Anita Frances Livingston Levy (died 1981) Londa Jean Matherne ( m. 1995)
Children	2; Including Harry Connick Jr.
Alma mater	Loyola University New Orleans (BA) Tulane University (JD)

Early life

Joseph Harry Fowler Connick Sr. was born in Mobile, Alabama, the second of eight children of Jessie Catherine (née Fowler) and James Paul Connick.[2][3] Both his parents and grandparents were from Mobile. His father worked for the United States Army Corps of Engineers. When Harry was two years old, the family moved to New Orleans.

Music was a large part of his early life, and he was particularly influenced by Glenn Miller.[4] 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.[2]

He later joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a civilian employee where he met his future wife, Anita Livingston, an accomplished flute player, who became a lawyer and judge. She was one of the first female judges in the city of New Orleans. They married in Tunisia, and spent time in Casablanca, where Connick Sr. contracted tuberculosis. They were sent back to the United States and eventually ended up in New Orleans again.[5] 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, in July 1981. On February 1, 1988, Connick married Barbara Bossetta at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans.[6] Barbara had two children from a previous marriage, Patricia and Robert Brandt. Connick later married Londa Jean Matherne on March 25, 1995 in County Tipperary, Ireland.[6] Connick is the uncle of Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick and State Representative Patrick Connick, also of Jefferson Parish.[2][7]

Music and life in New Orleans

Connick is still involved in New Orleans music and culture. In 1993, he and his son were part of the group that founded the Krewe of Orpheus, a superkrewe that participates in annual Mardi Gras parades.[8] He was nicknamed "The Singing District Attorney" by Time magazine.[9] This nickname was given to him because he spent many nights singing in clubs in the French Quarter, including Maxwell's Toulouse Cabaret.[10]

New Orleans District Attorney

In 1973, Connick defeated incumbent New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who had recently been tried and acquitted of corruption charges.

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.[11]

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.[11]

In 1987, Connick waged an unsuccessful challenge to incumbent William J. "Billy" Guste Jr. for the position of Louisiana Attorney General. 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.[12]

In 1989, Connick was indicted on racketeering charges for aiding and abetting a gambling operation by returning gambling records to an arrested gambler.[13] He stated that he returned the records to the man in question because he needed them to file tax returns. On July 25, 1990, he was acquitted.[14]

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.[15] According to the Review Board's final report, Connick instructed one of his investigators to destroy these documents after he took office.[16] 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.[16] 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.[17]

In 2003, Connick did not seek re-election and was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield.[18]

Controversies

Prosecutorial misconducts and innocents on death row

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."[19]

In the case of Shareef Cousin, Connick's attorneys withheld a key witness statement from the defense, arguing that the prosecution was under no legal obligation to disclose such information.[20] As a result, Cousin was put on death row at the age of 16, but the conviction and death sentence was overturned after four years, in 1999.[21]

Connick has recently defended himself against these claims. John Simerman, in a recent article in the Times-Picayune, reaffirms that, "the sheer number of trials in Orleans Parish criminal court distorts the numbers." Simerman continues, "In his last five years in office, the courthouse at Tulane and Broad handled nearly 2,200 trials, more than a third of the criminal trials in Louisiana."[22] Indeed, his office tried about 1,000 cases per year, as compared to the approximate 100 cases per year that the Garrison administration tried.[23]

Charges

Main article: Connick v. Thompson

In 2007, 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."[24] 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,[25] the Supreme Court overturned the $14 million award in a decision issued on March 29, 2011.[26] 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.[27]

References

1. U.S. Public Records Index Vol 1 & 2 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.), 2010.
2. Alexander, S. L. (13 October 2011). "Courtroom Carnival: Famous New Orleans Trials". Pelican Publishing Company, Inc. – via Google Books.
3. http://www.connicks.com/william.htm
4. ["Harry Connick Sr. Interview." Interview by Paul Leslie. Thepaulleslie.com. Lifestyles Entertainment & Paul Leslie, 1 Sept. 2011. Web. <http://www.thepaulleslie.com/justtheinterviews.cfm%5B%5D>.]
5. "Harry Connick Sr. Interview." Interview by Paul Leslie. Thepaulleslie.com. Lifestyles Entertainment & Paul Leslie, 1 Sept. 2011.
6. https://gw.geneanet.org/garydruilhet?lang=en&n=connick&oc=0&p=james+paul
7. "Jeremy Alford, "The Connick Connections," August 27, 2010". thejeffersonreport.com. Archived from the original on May 21, 2011. Retrieved September 21, 2011.
8. "1981: The Popularity of the Mardi Gras Superkrewe". The Times-Picayune. New Orleans Net LLC, 24 Dec. 2011. Web. 06 May 2012. <http://www.nola.com/175years/index.ssf/2011/12/1981_the_popularity_of_the_mar.html>.
9. Felix, Antonia. Wild about Harry: The Illustrated Biography of Harry Connick Jr. Dallas, TX: Taylor Pub., 1995. Print.
10. Alexander, S. L. "Harry Connick Sr.: The Singing DA" in Courtroom Carnival: Famous New Orleans Trials. Gretna: Pelican Pub., 2011. 85. https://books.google.com/books?id=lxWEMEh33GsC&pg=PA83&dq=James+and+Jessie+Fowler+Connick&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=James%20and%20Jessie%20Fowler%20Connick&f=true
11. Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138 (1983)
12. Leip, David. "1987 Attorney General Election Results." Louisiana Election Results. US Election Atlas, 12 Feb. 2007. Web. <http://www.uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?fips=22>.
13. "New Orleans Official Denies Aiding Gambler". The New York Times. Associated Press. December 22, 1989.
14. Frances Frank Marcus (July 26, 1990). "New Orleans Jury Acquits Official". The New York Times. Retrieved February 1, 2014.
15. Connick, Harry Sr. "Testimony of Harry Connick Sr." New Orleans, Louisiana. Assassination Records Review Board, 28 June 1995. Web. <http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/arrb/index23.htm>.
16. Assassination Records Review Board (September 30, 1998). "Chapter 7: Pursuit of Records and Information from Non-Federal Sources". Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board (pdf). Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. pp. 139–140. Retrieved September 9, 2017.
17. JFK Assassination Records. Papers of Jim Garrison. College Park, MD. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Web. <https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/finding-aids/garrison-papers.html>.
18. "Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame". cityofwinnfield.com. Archived from the original on September 16, 2009. Retrieved August 22, 2009.
19. "Innocent on Death Row – This week at the Supreme Court: Can a man exonerated of capital murder sue the prosecutor who convicted him?". Retrieved October 5, 2010.
20. David W. Neubauer (2008). America's courts and the criminal justice system. Cengage Learning. pp. 135–136. ISBN 978-0-495-09540-8. Retrieved 3 January 2012.
21. Lovinger, Caitlin. "Life After Death Row." The New York Times 22 Aug. 1999. The New York Times. Web. <https://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/22/weekinreview/life-after-death-row.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm>.
22. Simerman, John. "Former DA Harry Connick Defends His Leadership, Reputation." The Times-Picayune. New Orleans Net LLC, 1 Apr. 2012. Web. <http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/04/former_da_harry_connick_defend.html>.
23. Alexander, S. L. "Harry Connick Sr. : 'The Singing DA'" Courtroom Carnival: Famous New Orleans Trials. Gretna: Pelican Pub., 2011. 84. https://books.google.com/books?id=lxWEMEh33GsC&pg=PA83&dq=James+and+Jessie+Fowler+Connick&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=James%20and%20Jessie%20Fowler%20Connick&f=false
24. "Innocent on Death Row: "This week at the Supreme Court: Can a man exonerated of capital murder sue the prosecutor who convicted him?"". Retrieved October 5, 2010.
25. "Supreme Court rules against exonerated death row inmate who sued prosecutors" by Robert Barnes, The Washington Post, March 29, 2011
26. "Court: Exonerated Inmate Doesn't Get $14 Million". Associated Press. March 29, 2011.
27. CONNICK v. THOMPSON. The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. 27 April 2012. <https://www.oyez.org/cases/2010-2019/2010/2010_09_571>.

Legal offices
Preceded by Jim Garrison	District Attorney, Orleans Parish, Louisiana 1973-2003	Succeeded by Eddie Jordan