Curtis Flowers

On the morning of July 16, 1996, a retired employee of Tardy Furniture entered the store and found three bodies: owner Bertha Tardy, and employees, Robert Golden and Carmen Rigby were deceased. A third employee, Derrick Stewart, who was 16 at the time, died later at the hospital. All had been fatally shot. Flowers was charged with murder in the shooting deaths of the four victims. ==Trials and state-court appeals==

Summary State District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted all six of Flowers's trials. 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. The sixth (2010) resulted in a conviction, and an appeal failed. The following year the state court confirmed the original decision. First trial and appeals (1997–2000) Flowers was first tried in 1997, before Judge Clarence E. Morgan III. The prosecutor decided to try Flowers for the death of the store owner, Bertha Tardy, In addition, prosecution witnesses testified that projectiles found at the crime scene were most likely from a .380-caliber pistol, the same as a gun stolen from Flowers's uncle on the morning of the murders. $400 was found to be missing from the till, and $235 was found in Flowers's headboard. Of the original two witnesses to the confession, both later retracted their testimony. A third witness alleged a later confession by Flowers when the both of them were in a different prison, after the first trial, but that witness also later recanted. and said he never admitted any crimes to his cellmates. He said he was wearing Nike shoes that day, the clothes he was wearing did not match the description given by eyewitnesses, and the particulate matter on his hands was due to his having handled fireworks the day before the murders. In addition, the prosecutor was held to have asked questions "not in good faith" and "without basis in fact."). Evans then used the state's three alternate juror strikes to exclude African-Americans.) The state Supreme Court stated that there was disparate treatment by the prosecutor in evaluation of black compared with white jurors on issues such as the jurors' connections with the defendants and the jurors' willingness to use the death penalty; he struck blacks from the jury on grounds for which he did not strike whites. In addition, the court found that although in many cases Evans presented race-neutral reasons to strike, he used the challenge process as "an exercise in finding race neutral reasons to justify racially motivated strikes." The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the conviction, on the request of family of the victims who, aware that the defense would have the harder task of appealing a higher court if the sentence was life in prison, wanted the trial concluded so they could 'move on'. the resulting jury, however, had five African Americans on it. The fourth trial ended in a mistrial, as the jury was split 7–5 in favor of conviction; votes could be classified by race, among other factors, with African Americans voting to acquit. Fifth trial (2008) The prosecution sought the death penalty for Flowers for the four murders in his fifth trial, which took place in 2008. This time Joseph Loper sat as judge. was arrested for perjury for lying during jury selection when she said she did not know Flowers. The trial, with a jury of nine white and three black jurors, concluded in 2008 in a mistrial due to a hung jury. James Bibbs, an African American, was the sole juror opposed to conviction. Immediately after the trial the judge, Joseph Loper, accused Bibbs of perjury for having lied during jury selection. Loper was also recused as judge in Bibbs' trial. Sixth trial and appeals (2010–2014) A jury for a sixth capital murder trial was convened in Winona, Mississippi on June 10, 2010; it was composed of eleven white jurors and one black juror, After deliberating for approximately 90 minutes during the penalty phase, the jury returned a death sentence. An appeal by Flowers failed, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruling in 2014 that the conviction was to be upheld. ==First U.S. Supreme Court ruling==

In June 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court included Flowers's case among three capital cases it remanded to lower courts to review for racial bias by the prosecution in jury selection. ==In the Dark==

In 2018, the second season of the American Public Media podcast In the Dark was based on reporting about the Flowers case, hosted and reported by journalist Madeleine Baran. Through in-depth investigative reporting, serious doubt was cast on the legitimacy of the case against Flowers, including claims by numerous witnesses that they had perjured themselves, potential misconduct by the prosecutor, and the disappearance of a gun, potentially the murder weapon, after it was turned over to police. ==Second U.S. Supreme Court ruling==

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. A petition for a writ of certiorari was filed, seeking review of the Mississippi Supreme Court's application of Batson v. Kentucky. The U.S. Supreme Court granted the writ on November 2, 2018. Amicus briefs on behalf of Flowers were filed by the Magnolia Bar Association, the Mississippi Center for Justice, and Innocence Project New Orleans. On June 21, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Flowers's sixth conviction with a vote of 7–2 in Flowers v. Mississippi. 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. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority decision: "The state's relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the state wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury. We cannot ignore that history." Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented from the Court's decision. The Washington Post described Evans as conducting "a prosecutorial pursuit that may be without parallel". In total in the six trials, Evans had used 41 of 42 challenges to exclude African Americans from the juries. ==Resolution of ongoing case==

Flowers continued to be held at Parchman, then at the Grenada County, Mississippi, jail, and the Winston-Chickasaw Regional Correctional Facility, in Louisville, Mississippi, pending decisions from prosecutors and the local court on any future prosecution. 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. 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. This suit was later dismissed on procedural grounds. On December 16, 2019, Judge Loper granted Flowers bail in the amount of $250,000, of which he was required to deposit 10 percent. Flowers was restricted to his residence, and required to wear an ankle monitor. Judge Loper noted in his decision that several of the prosecution's key witnesses had recanted. 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. District Attorney Evans, prosecutor in all six of Flowers's trials, recused himself from the case in January 2020 and asked the presiding judge to turn over prosecution to the Mississippi Attorney General's office. The state declined to prosecute Flowers for the seventh time, officially dropping all charges against Flowers on September 4, 2020. 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. The case was dismissed with prejudice, barring further prosecution and thus freeing Flowers and bringing the case to a formal conclusion. ==References==