Imagine if you were found guilty of a robbery and murder that you did not commit, and then spent 14 years of your life on death row. Imagine if prosecutors deliberately suppressed evidence at your trial that would have exonerated you. What do you think it should cost the state and prosecution for intentionally imprisoning an innocent man?

Well, in the case of a Louisiana man named John Thompson, a jury awarded him $15 million. A civil court and two federal courts ruled that he had suffered a miscarriage of justice, and should be compensated for the years he’d spent in prison and the stress of being on death row. But in a truly bizarre 5-4 ruling this past week, the five conservative members of the Supreme Court overturned the ruling. Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, orally read her dissenting opinion from the bench, strongly criticizing the decision.

Thompson was weeks away from being executed when an investigator found blood evidence on the robbery victim’s clothing that proved his innocence. Thompson was Type O, but the blood evidence was Type B. That critical evidence was purposely withheld from Thompson’s lawyer by a team of prosecutors in the New Orleans Parrish District Attorney’s Office, and ultimately led to his murder conviction.

In his civil rights lawsuit after his exoneration, Thompson claimed that former New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr. (the father of Harry Connick Jr.) suppressed the exculpatory blood evidence, knowingly allowed prosecutors in his office to engage in repeated acts of misconduct, and failed to train his prosecutors about how to handle exculpatory evidence. Connick, in a truly convoluted bit of logic, claimed in his own testimony that training would make his job more difficult.

What makes this Supreme Court ruling all the more difficult to understand, is that the court was well aware of this culture of corruption in New Orleans, having previously vacated a capital murder conviction prosecuted by Connick’s office. In that 5-4 decision the court also found evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, as was found by the lower courts in Thompson’s case. Connick himself had previously been indicted by federal prosecutors for suppressing a lab report. It appears that the only difference in the two rulings is that Justice Alito replaced Justice O’Connor on the court.

It’s troubling enough when lawyers sworn to uphold the law deliberately suppress evidence in some warped, misguided attempt at justice. But now we have a majority on the Supreme Court that more often than not seems blinded by its ideology. There is a reason why Lady Justice is depicted as balancing the scales of truth and fairness while wearing a blindfold. I’m not sure that all members of the current court understand the personification.