Racism White Supremacy and Authority are the Unofficial Causes of Death for Curtis Flowers at Age 56: White DA Falsely Prosecuted Him 6X for Murder, Removed All Black Jurors in Bullshit Trials
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Curtis Flowers, a Black man whose six trials in the same Mississippi murder case became a national symbol of racial bias in jury selection, leading the Supreme Court to reverse his capital conviction in 2019, died at home this week in Winona, Miss. He was 56.
His sister Priscilla Flowers-Ward said he had been suffering from advanced diabetes, and that the family was awaiting an autopsy to identify the cause of death.
Curtis Flowers was transferred off death row in Parchman prison in Mississippi and released in December 2019, after nearly 23 years behind bars. His release followed the Supreme Court’s ruling that Black people had been unconstitutionally excluded from the jury in his sixth trial.
In the 7-2 majority opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the state of Mississippi had pursued a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.”
Mr. Flowers was convicted in that trial of killing four people in 1996 at a furniture store where he had once worked in Winona, a small city in central Mississippi.
The white district attorney, Doug Evans, who tried all of Mr. Flowers’ six cases, spent two decades employing the same tactic: ensuring that few or no Black residents in the majority-Black county were seated on Mr. Flowers’ juries.
Across the half-dozen trials, 61 of the 72 jurors were white. Two of the prosecutions ended in mistrials, and four in convictions that were overturned on appeal.
Mr. Flowers’ ordeal gained broader attention through a 2018 podcast, In the Dark, which identified holes in the prosecution’s case. One witness who had testified at four of Mr. Flowers’ trials, and who had said that Mr. Flowers had confessed to the crime in jail, recanted to the podcast reporters. [MORE]
