The world lost a hero: Remembering Ken Thompson

I’ll never forget the first time I met Ken Thompson. It was in the conference room of Ken’s law office near Union Square in the spring of 2013, after he had decided to take on a beast of a challenge: defeating the sitting Brooklyn district attorney.

As he walked through his biography and described the rationale for his candidacy, I was impressed. Rarely do you encounter a first-time candidate with such serenity, conviction and discipline.

“We will win, James,” he concluded, with an aura of confidence that might have appeared slightly delusional if uttered by anyone else. But in Ken’s commanding voice, it was convincing.

Ken was a man of faith and determination. And to win this election, the campaign would require more than a few blessings in order for everything to fall into place.

Notwithstanding the candidate’s certitude, few observers believed Ken could win, and for good reason – the historical odds were long to the point of absurdity. Incumbent prosecutors win re-election approximately 95 percent of the time their names are on the ballot. In Brooklyn, the last time a sitting district attorney lost an election was during the presidency of William Howard Taft in 1911.

Ken was running against a district attorney who had been elected seven times. Four years earlier, he had run unopposed. The Kings County Democratic Party and many local officials stood by the incumbent.

In the face of a daily onslaught from the media, political opponents and legal adversaries, I saw firsthand Ken’s refusal to back down from tough battles.

There’s no doubt Ken’s fighting spirit and commitment to justice were inspired by the strong women in his life, chief among them his extraordinary wife Lu-Shawn, his biggest champion and the mother of the two children who made him so proud, and his beloved mother, Clara, herself a trailblazer as one of the first female police officers to patrol the streets of New York City in the 1970s.

Ultimately, Ken was right. We did win.

When he was decisively elected in an upset victory and became the first black district attorney in Brooklyn’s history, Ken wasted no time reimagining the role of a modern-day prosecutor.

In an interview before he passed away, Ken expressed his abiding principles thusly: “I think that the main duty of the D.A. is to do justice. That means to protect public safety, but it also means that we have to ensure that our criminal justice system is based on fundamental fairness.”

In less than three years, Ken transformed an office corrupted by prosecutorial misconduct into a national model for progressive justice. His visionary action to end prosecutions for low-level marijuana violations and his program to allow 250,000 residents to wipe out warrants for minor offenses were both later implemented citywide.

But it was his fight to end wrongful convictions that will remain Ken’s enduring legacy.

Established soon after he entered office, Ken’s innovative Conviction Review Unit either vacated or dismissed 21 convictions of people who were wrongfully imprisoned for murder and other offenses. It’s impossible to overstate his accomplishments in this regard. To put these numbers in perspective, Brooklyn represents 0.07 percent of the country’s population, but accounted for 11.4 percent of its exonerations in Ken’s first year in office.

In politics, the phrase “elections have consequences” is an overused platitude. But no one illustrated this expression in the truest sense more than Ken Thompson. The stark reality is that people would be languishing in prison today for crimes they hadn’t committed if Brooklyn’s voters had elected a different candidate. And because of that fateful choice, the lives of those exonerated were forever changed by the actions of a brave prosecutor who redefined what it means to do justice.

The world lost a hero last week, and it’s overwhelming knowing that our brother Ken is with God now. As we mourn the loss of a great leader and grieve for his family, it’s our duty to honor Ken’s memory by supporting the movement to ensure criminal justice reforms continue at every level of government, without interruption

With the fortitude that defined Ken’s visionary, but heartbreakingly brief, tenure as our guide, we must prove him right again. And we will win

James Freedland is a Democratic political strategist based in New York City.