Harry Connick Sr., New Orleans D.A. Criticized for Overreach, Dies at 97

Harry Connick Sr., a long-serving district attorney in New Orleans whose office gained national notoriety for prosecutorial overreach that eventually resulted in many reversed convictions, died on Thursday at his home in New Orleans. He was 97.

His death was announced by his son, the singer Harry Connick Jr., in a statement.

The older Mr. Connick was a singer himself and became locally renowned for his nightclub performances in the French Quarter. But his national reputation as a district attorney was much darker, particularly after a 2011 dissent by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that blasted the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office, under his leadership, for singular incompetence and misconduct.

Justice Ginsburg found that Mr. Connick’s subordinates systematically hid evidence that could aid the defense, in violation of the Constitution. Mr. Connick, she said, had “created a tinderbox in Orleans Parish” in which violations of the defendant’s right to be given evidence were “nigh inevitable.”

The justice excoriated Mr. Connick for his “cavalier approach,” noting that he himself acknowledged that he had “stopped reading law books” and “looking at opinions” after first being elected in 1973.

Louisiana has routinely had one of the world’s highest incarceration rates, and the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office bears much of the responsibility.

According to the Innocence Project of New Orleans, which works to free the wrongfully convicted, 32 of those convicted during Mr. Connick’s time in office, from 1973 to 2003, were “factually innocent” and later exonerated. In 27 of those cases there was prosecutorial misconduct by Mr. Connick’s assistants, the group’s director, Jee Park, said in an email.