Curtis Flowers’ Murder Charges Are Finally Dropped. It Only Took 6 Trials and 24 Years.

The Mississippi Attorney General called the cased “unprecedented.”

Curtis Flowers flanked by sister Priscilla Ward, right, exits the Winston Choctaw Regional Correctional Facility in Louisville, Miss., Monday, Dec. 16, 2019.AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Mississippi who has been tried for the same crime a stunning six times, is now officially a free man.

Flowers’ case came to national attention when his saga was featured in the second season of In the Dark, an investigative podcast that unraveled the racial underpinnings of the criminal justice system. Flowers was tried and convicted six times on murder charges by mostly white juries and was sentenced to death in 2010 even as he insisted he was innocent. It all started in 1996, in the small city of Winowna, Mississippi, when four people were found gunned down in a furniture store. Flowers, who worked at the store, was identified by an overzealous prosecutor named Doug Evans. The ensuing six trials became one of the clearest examples of racially discriminatory jury selection; across Flowers’ six trials, 61 of the 72 jurors who decided his fate were white.

When the case reached the US Supreme Court in 2019, my colleague Samantha Michaels reported

On Wednesday, as Flowers’ case went before the Supreme Court, his attorneys argued that racial bias played a role in the jury selection and unfairly led to his conviction. It had happened to Flowers before: Of the five trials before 2010, two were thrown out after lower courts determined that the prosecutor removed certain people from the jury pool simply because they were Black, violating a 1986 Supreme Court ruling called Batson v. Kentucky that says it’s unconstitutional to strike potential jurors on account of their race…

But as critics point out, it’s fairly easy to come up with another justification, even when race is the motivating factor. Courts have found it acceptable to exclude potential jurors because they had bad posture, lived in a dangerous neighborhood, or had a beard. In Flowers’ sixth trial, District Attorney Doug Evans reasoned he was striking some of the Black potential jurors because they knew the Flowers family, even though some white jurors had connections to the family as well. In North Carolina, a major study last year found that prosecutors in the state removed African American jurors at about twice the rate that they removed white jurors, a pattern that likely holds up in other states.

The Supreme Court ruled that Evans had unconstitutionally kept Black people from serving on the jury. Meanwhile, Flowers was released from prison on bail. In January, Evans recused himself from the case, and the Mississippi attorney general’s office took over. In a memo released on Friday, that office said, “it is in the interest of justice that the State will not seek an unprecedented seventh trial of Mr. Flowers.” Flowers entered prison when he was 26 years old and is now 50. 

“Today, I am finally free from the injustice that left me locked in a box for 23 years,” Flowers said in a statement, according to the New York Times.

“I’ve been asked if I ever thought this day would come,” he continued. “With a family that never gave up on me and with them by my side, I knew it would.”

If you haven’t already, check out the podcast In the Dark for more on the story.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate