Mr. Connick dethroned an incumbent prosecutor, Jim Garrison, in a 1973 election. He won reelection four times and successfully built biracial support as the city’s political power base shifted to African Americans.
After retiring in 2003, he was dogged by questions about whether his office withheld evidence that favored defendants. The issue came to the forefront with a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a lawsuit filed by John Thompson, who was exonerated after 14 years on Louisiana’s death row for a killing he didn’t commit.
In a 5-4 decision, the high court overturned a $14 million award for Thompson, ruling that the New Orleans district attorney’s office shouldn’t be punished for not specifically training prosecutors on their obligations to share evidence that could prove a defendant’s innocence. In a scathing dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg decried “Connick’s deliberately indifferent attitude.”
The issue was revived in 2014 when a murder conviction against Reginald Adams, imprisoned for 34 years, was reversed. Attorneys for the Innocence Project New Orleans presented evidence that detectives and prosecutors in the case had withheld critical information before Adams’s 1990 conviction. Adams later received $1.25 million in a court settlement.
Mr. Connick repeatedly declined to comment on the cases but defended his legacy in an 2012 interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
“My reputation is based on something other than a case, or two cases or five cases, or one interception or 20 interceptions,” he said. “Look at the rest of my record. … Perfect? No. But I’ve done nothing to go to confession about in that office. At all.”
Joseph Harry Fowler Connick Sr. was born in Mobile, Ala., on March 27, 1926, and moved to New Orleans with his family at 2 for his father’s career with the Army Corps of Engineers.
He served in the Navy in the South Pacific during World War II, then graduated from Loyola University in New Orleans with a degree in business administration and received a law degree from Tulane University.
In 1973, Mr. Connick was a little-known federal prosecutor when he took on Garrison, a three-term district attorney.
Known as “Big Jim,” the 6-foot-7 Garrison gained worldwide publicity when he unsuccessfully prosecuted a New Orleans businessman in connection with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and insisted that a massive cover-up was taking place regarding the assassination.
After Garrison lost his big case, Mr. Connick challenged him by running as a reformer and won by just over 2,000 votes.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Connick led crackdowns on prostitutes and used 19th-century morality laws to shut down adult book shops in the French Quarter. In the ’90s, anti-capital-punishment groups attacked Mr. Connick for his insistence that prosecutors seek the death penalty in most first-degree murder cases.
Mr. Connick learned firsthand about being a defendant: Federal prosecutors charged him in 1990 with racketeering and aiding a sports-betting operation. The indictment alleged that Mr. Connick returned betting records to a convicted bookmaker who wanted the records to collect gambling debts.
Mr. Connick was acquitted, then won his fourth election the same year.
His first wife, Anita Levy Livingston, died in 1981. In 1995, he married Londa Matherne. In addition to his wife, survivors include two children from his first marriage, Suzanna and Harry Jr.
For years, the elder Connick sang pop standards in French Quarter nightclubs. His music was politically useful. He developed close friendships with Black musicians — and Black voters. That was crucial for a White candidate in a city where, at the time, nearly 70 percent of voters were African Americans.
Support from powerful Black politicians was also key to his political survival. In 1996, Mr. Connick defeated a Black challenger and gave credit to Mayor Marc Morial, whose supporters campaigned heavily for Connick.