Curtis Flowers

Curtis Giovanni Flowers (born May 29, 1970)[1] is an American man who was tried for murder six times in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Four of the trials resulted in convictions, all of which were overturned on appeal. 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. Flowers was first convicted in 1997; in five of the six trials, the prosecutor, Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans, a Democrat, sought the death penalty against Flowers. As a result, Flowers was held on death row at the Parchman division of Mississippi State Penitentiary for over 20 years.

2015 photo of building where Tardy Furniture was located (33.481440°N 89.728119°W / 33.481440; -89.728119 (Tardy's Furniture, 116 S Front St))[2]
Curtis Flowers
Born (1970-05-29) May 29, 1970
NationalityAmerican
Notes
Two mistrials and four overturned convictions, the last by U.S. Supreme Court; Mississippi declined to further prosecute case.

In his first trial, Flowers was convicted of the aggravated murder and robbery of the store owner. 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. A subsequent trial for all four murders resulted in conviction, but this was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court for racial bias by the prosecutor in jury selection: Flowers is black and the prosecution excluded a disproportionate number of black jurors. Flowers' fourth and fifth trials ended as mistrials. On June 18, 2010, a majority-white jury in Flowers' sixth trial convicted him of the 1996 murders and voted to impose a death sentence.[3]

Flowers' case was one of three that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2016 were to be remanded to lower courts to be reviewed for evidence of racial bias in jury selection.[4] After the Mississippi Supreme Court reaffirmed the conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court again reviewed Flowers' case.[5] It overturned, on a 7–2 vote, the murder convictions in June 2019 in the decision Flowers v. Mississippi, with conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing for the 7–2 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. On September 4, 2020, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a Republican who had taken over the case from District Attorney Evans, announced she would not seek a seventh trial and had dropped the charges against Flowers.[8]

The Flowers case served as the subject of a 2018 podcast, In the Dark, on American Public Media.

Case

On the morning of July 16, 1996, a retired employee of Tardy Furniture entered the store and found four bodies: owner Bertha Tardy, and three employees, Robert Golden, Carmen Rigby, and Derrick Stewart, who was 16 at the time of his murder. All had been fatally shot.[9][10] Curtis Flowers was suspected after police learned that he had been fired from the store 13 days prior to the murders.[11][10] He also owed Bertha Tardy $30 for a cash advance on his paycheck.[10]

Certain eyewitnesses said they saw Flowers near the front of the store on the morning of the shootings.[10] No gun was found, but bullets from the scene were determined to be the same caliber as a gun that had been stolen from Flowers' uncle's car the same day as the murders. The Mississippi Crime Lab found that bullets fired previously from the uncle's gun matched the ballistics evidence of bullets found at the murder scene.[12] Flowers was charged with murder in the shooting deaths of the four victims.[13]

Trials and state court appeals

Summary

State District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted all six of Flower's trials.[14] 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.[15][16]

The fourth (2007) and fifth (2008) ended in hung juries.[15] The sixth (2010) resulted in a conviction, and an appeal failed.[15][16][9]

In 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court referred the sixth trial back to the Mississippi Supreme Court for review of racial discrimination in jury selection.[15][17] The following year the state court confirmed the original decision.[9][15] The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Flowers' conviction in 2019 because of Evans' efforts to keep black people off the jury.[17] Flowers was released on bail to await the state's next decision. Evans recused himself from the case and handed the case to the State Attorney General.[16][14] In 2020, it was announced that charges would be dropped against Flowers.[18]

First trial (1997)
Trial 1:[9] Oct. 1997
Judge Clarence E. Morgan III Murder counts: 1 (Bertha Tardy)
Prosecution: Doug Evans Jury: All white
Defense: John Gilmore; Billy Gilmore Outcome: Guilty. Sentenced to death
Appeal: Conviction overturned in 2000 by Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct

Flowers was first tried in 1997, before Judge Clarence E. Morgan III.[9] The prosecutor decided to try Flowers for the death of the store owner, Bertha Tardy,[9] as occurring in the course of a robbery. This would increase the penalty for conviction, making the defendant eligible for the death penalty.[19] The prosecution said that bloody footprints found at the crime scene were a size 10½, the same as that worn by Flowers. They were identified as Fila's Grant Hill style, which witnesses said Flowers had been wearing that morning.[20]

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' uncle on the morning of the murders.[12] Forensic evidence revealed gunpowder residue on Flowers' hand.[12][21] $400 was found to be missing from the till, and $235 was found in Flowers' headboard.[21] According to two of Flowers' cellmates in the first jail in which he was held, Flowers admitted to them that he had stolen the money and committed the murders.[22] Flowers denied this.[23] Of the original two witnesses to the confession, one of the witnesses has since died with no further elaboration on the confession and the other later retracted his testimony.[22] 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.[23]

Flowers maintained that he was innocent of the murders[24] and said that he never admitted any crimes to his cellmates.[23] He claimed to simply have stopped going to the job and did not know he had been fired.[25] 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.[23] In 1997 he was convicted of the murder of the store owner by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.[15]

The conviction verdict in the first trial was overturned in 2000 by the Mississippi Supreme Court after Flowers appealed.[9][15] The court held that evidence presented by Evans on behalf of the state was prejudicial because, in presenting evidence for all four murders, it went beyond that necessary to prove the murder of Tardy alone.[23][26] In addition, the prosecutor was held to have asked questions "not in good faith" and "without basis in fact."[23] The court remanded the case for a re-trial.[23]

Second trial (1999)
Trial 2:[9] March 1999
Judge Clarence E. Morgan III Murder counts: 1 (Derrick "Bobo" Stewart)
Prosecution: Doug Evans Jury: 11 white, 1 black
Defense: Chokwe Lumumba;[27] Harvey Freelon Outcome: Guilty. Sentenced to death
Appeal: Conviction overturned in 2003 by Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct.

While the first case was still under appeal,[28] prosecutors initiated a second trial for the murder of employee Derrick Stewart at the Tardy store.[9] Morgan was the judge again;[9] one black person was on the jury.[15][9] Scheduled for September 1998, the court granted the defence a change of venue, moving the trial to Harrison County due to the difficulties in getting a fair and impartial jury in Montgomery County, and the trial started in on 22 March 1999.[28] Flowers was convicted on 30 March and sentenced to death.[28] This verdict was also overturned (in 2003) on appeal by the Mississippi Supreme Court, which held that Evans' prosecution "employed many of the same tactics during the second trial" as it did in the first, the court had improperly allowed evidence regarding the other murders to be admitted, and that other prosecutorial errors were made.[9][28][15]

Third trial (2004)
Trial 3:[9] Feb. 2004
Judge Clarence E. Morgan III Murder counts: 4
Prosecution: Doug Evans Jury: 11 white, 1 black
Defense: Ray Charles Carter; Andre de Gruy; Stacy Ferraro Outcome: Guilty. Sentenced to death
Appeal: Conviction overturned in 2007 by Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecution's racial discrimination in jury selection.

A third trial on charges of four counts of murder was concluded on February 12, 2004, and Flowers was convicted of each murder. The jury sentenced him to death. Morgan was again the judge.[9] 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.[9][15] During the selection process, Evans challenged African-American jurors with its first seven strikes, which resulted in a Batson challenge by the defense (Batson v. Kentucky (1986) established that peremptory challenge cannot be used to discriminate against jurors based on race, ethnicity, or sex[29]).[30] Following its submission of non-racial grounds for its challenges, Evans used all of the state's five remaining challenges to strike African-American jurors. This left the jury with only two African-American jurors, one of which was subsequently excused after informing the judge that he could not be impartial.[30] Evans then used the state's three alternate juror strikes to exclude African-Americans.[30] The final jury consisted of one African-American and 11 whites.[9][15] (The county population is 45% African American.[31])

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,[30] saying there had been "as strong [a] case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge".[29]

Fourth trial (2007)
Trial 4:[9] Nov. 2007
Judge Clarence E. Morgan III Murder counts: 4
Prosecution: Doug Evans Jury: 7 white, 5 black
Defense: Ray Charles Carter; Andre de Gruy Outcome: Mistrial (hung jury)

At the fourth trial, before Morgan in 2007 on four counts of murder,[9] the prosecution did not seek the death penalty[32] on the request of family of the victims who, aware that the defence 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'.[19] Evans exhausted the state's peremptory challenges in jury selection striking off black candidates;[33] the resulting jury, however, had five African Americans on it.[15][34] 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.[15][35][36]

Fifth trial (2008)
Trial 5:[9] Sept. 2008
Judge Joseph Loper Murder counts: 4
Prosecution: Doug Evans Jury: 9 white, 3 black
Defense: Alison Steiner; Ray Charles Carter; Andre de Gruy Outcome: Mistrial (hung jury)

The prosecution sought the death penalty for Flowers for the four murders in his fifth trial, which took place in 2008.[37] This time Joseph Loper sat as judge.[9] On the first day of testimony, an alternate juror, the only black woman on the jury,[10] was arrested for perjury for lying during jury selection when she said she did not know Flowers.[37][38] The trial, with a jury of nine white and three black jurors, concluded in 2008 in a mistrial due to a hung jury.[15][16] James Bibbs, an African American, was the sole juror opposed to conviction. Immediately after the trial the judge, Joseph Loper, accused Bibbs of perjury[39] for having lied during jury selection.[40][41] Loper recommended Bibbs be prosecuted by Doug Evans, who, after eight months, recused himself and the new prosecution dropped the charges against Bibbs as there was no evidence.[42][40] Loper was also recused as judge in Bibbs' trial.[41]

Sixth trial (2010)
Trial 6:[9] June 2010
Judge Joseph Loper Murder counts: 4
Prosecution: Doug Evans Jury: 11 white, 1 black
Defense: Alison Steiner; Ray Charles Carter; Andre de Gruy Outcome: Guilty. Sentenced to death
Appeal: Conviction upheld in 2014 and 2017 by Mississippi Supreme Court. Conviction overturned in 2019 by U.S. Supreme Court due to prosecution's racial discrimination in jury selection.

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,[15][9] and presided over by Judge Loper.[9] Following 30 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Flowers guilty of four counts of capital murder.[19] After deliberating for approximately 90 minutes during the penalty phase, the jury returned a death sentence.[43] An appeal by Flowers failed, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruling in 2014 that the conviction was to be upheld.[9][15]

First U.S. Supreme Court ruling

In June 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court included Flowers' case among three capital cases it remanded to lower courts to review for racial bias by the prosecution in jury selection.[4] In November 2017, the Mississippi Supreme Court renewed its prior determination, and affirmed Flowers' conviction and death sentence from the sixth trial.[44]

In the Dark
Further information: In the Dark (podcast) § Season 2

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 retracted confessions by numerous witnesses, potential misconduct by the prosecutor, and the disappearance of a gun, potentially the murder weapon, after it was turned over to police.[45][46][47][48]

Second U.S. Supreme Court ruling
Main article: Flowers v. Mississippi

New evidence uncovered during the In the Dark investigation was used by Flowers' 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. Kentucky.[50] The U.S. Supreme Court granted the writ on November 2, 2018.[50]

The court heard oral argument on March 20, 2019.[51] Amicus briefs on behalf of Flowers were filed by the Magnolia Bar Association, the Mississippi Centre for Justice, and Innocence Project New Orleans.[52] On June 21, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Flowers' sixth conviction with a vote of 7–2 in Flowers v. Mississippi.[26][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' 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."[54]

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented from the Court's decision.[6]

The Washington Post described Evans as conducting "a prosecutorial pursuit that may be without parallel".[54] In total in the six trials, Evans had used 41 of 42 challenges to exclude African Americans from the juries.[6]

Resolution of ongoing case

Flowers continued to be held at Parchman, then at the Grenada County, Mississippi, jail,[55] and the Winston-Chickasaw Regional Correctional Facility, in Louisville, Mississippi,[56] 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.[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.[58] This suit was later dismissed on procedural grounds.[59]

On December 16, 2019, Judge Loper granted Flowers bail in the amount of $250,000, of which he was required to deposit 10 percent.[60] Flowers was restricted to his residence, and required to wear an ankle monitor.[61][62] Judge Loper noted in his decision that several of the prosecution's key witnesses had recanted. In addition, the documentary 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' case despite court orders to do so.[61][63] 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.[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.[66] The case was dismissed with prejudice,[67] barring further prosecution and thus freeing Flowers and bringing the case to a formal conclusion.

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