Curtis Flowers
Curtis Giovanni Flowers (born May 29, 1970)[1] is an American man who was tried for the same murders six times by the same prosecutor in the U.S. state of Mississippi.
Flowers was alleged to have committed the July 16, 1996, shooting deaths of four people inside Tardy Furniture store in Winona, seat of Montgomery County.
As a result, Flowers was held on death row at the Parchman division of Mississippi State Penitentiary for over 20 years.
This verdict and a conviction in a second trial for the murder of one of the store employees were both overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct.
On June 18, 2010, a majority-white jury in Flowers's sixth trial convicted him of the 1996 murders and voted to impose a death sentence.
[5] It overturned, on a 7–2 vote, the murder convictions in June 2019 in the decision Flowers v. Mississippi, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing for the majority.
[6][7] In December 2019, Flowers was released from prison for the first time since his original arrest, on $250,000 bond, pending a state decision on whether it would attempt another prosecution.
In early 2021, Flowers was awarded $500,000—the maximum allowed under Mississippi law providing compensation for wrongful incarceration.
[15] The first through third trials (1997, 1999, 2004) ended in convictions but were overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court – the first two because of prosecutorial misconduct; the third because District Attorney Evans was found to have discriminated against black jurors during jury selection.
[21] In addition, prosecution witnesses testified that projectiles found at the crime scene were most likely from a .380 caliber weapon, the same as a gun stolen from Flowers's uncle on the morning of the murders.
[24] While the first case was still under appeal,[29] prosecutors initiated a second trial for the murder of employee Derrick Stewart at the Tardy store.
[10] The verdict was overturned in 2007 by the Mississippi Supreme Court as it held that Evans' peremptory challenges in jury selection were racially motivated and thus unconstitutional.
The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the conviction,[31] saying there had been "as strong [a] case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge".
Immediately after the trial the judge, Joseph Loper, accused Bibbs of perjury[40] for having lied during jury selection.
[4] In November 2017, the Mississippi Supreme Court renewed its prior determination, and affirmed Flowers's conviction and death sentence from the sixth trial.
[45][46][47][48] New evidence uncovered during the In the Dark investigation was used by Flowers's lawyers to attempt to get his conviction overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
[48][47] A petition for a writ of certiorari was filed,[49] seeking review of the Mississippi Supreme Court's application of Batson v.
[51] Amicus briefs on behalf of Flowers were filed by the Magnolia Bar Association, the Mississippi Center for Justice, and Innocence Project New Orleans.
[27][53] The Supreme Court's decision was made based on the argument that the prosecutor, Doug Evans, had committed a Batson violation by striking all but one prospective black juror in Flowers's sixth trial.
Flowers's attorneys petitioned for the charges to be dismissed, or failing that, for bail to be granted and for Doug Evans to be removed from any role in the prosecution, citing the multiple findings of prosecutorial misconduct in the case.
[55][57] Evans was sued in federal court by the local NAACP chapter on behalf of multiple Flowers's jury pool members, seeking class action status to include all jury-eligible black residents of his district, based on his alleged systematic racial discrimination in jury selection.
In addition, the podcast In the Dark reported that potentially exculpatory evidence had been uncovered, as well as alternative suspects, seemingly leaving the prosecution with a weaker case than in the previous trials.
[61] Judge Loper reprimanded Evans, who was expected to but did not attend the hearing, for taking no action over the preceding four months to further Flowers's case despite court orders to do so.
[64][65] The Attorney General's office stated that it would be nearly impossible to convict Flowers due to the lack of any available living witnesses who had not recanted or otherwise rendered their testimony unusable by making multiple conflicting statements, the identification of alternative suspects, and new potentially-exculpatory evidence.
