Court tosses black man’s murder conviction over racial bias

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday threw out the murder conviction and death sentence for a black man in Mississippi because of a prosecutor’s efforts to keep African Americans off the jury. The defendant already has been tried six times and now could face a seventh trial.

The removal of black prospective jurors deprived inmate Curtis Flowers of a fair trial, the court said in a 7-2 decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The long record of Flowers’ trials stretching back more than 20 years shows District Attorney Doug Evans’ “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals,” with the goal of an all-white jury, Kavanaugh wrote.

In Flowers’ sixth trial, the jury was made up of 11 whites and one African American. Evans struck five black prospective jurors.

In the earlier trials, three convictions were tossed out, including one when the prosecutor improperly excluded African Americans from the jury. In the second trial, the judge chided Evans for striking a juror based on race. Two other trials ended when jurors couldn’t reach unanimous verdicts.

“The numbers speak loudly,” Kavanaugh said in a summary of his opinion that he read in the courtroom, noting that Evans had removed 41 of the 42 prospective black jurors over the six trials. “We cannot ignore that history.”

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas called Kavanaugh’s opinion “manifestly incorrect” and wrote that Flowers “presented no evidence whatsoever of purposeful race discrimination.” Justice Neil Gorsuch joined most of Thomas’ opinion.

Thomas, the only African American on the court, said the decision may have one redeeming quality: “The state is perfectly free to convict Curtis Flowers again.”

Flowers has been in jail more than 22 years, since his arrest after four people were found shot to death in a furniture store in Winona, Miss., in July 1996.

Flowers was arrested several months later, described by prosecutors as a disgruntled former employee who sought revenge against the store’s owner because she fired him and withheld most of his pay to cover the cost of merchandise he damaged. Nearly $300 was found missing after the killings.

Defense lawyers have argued that witness statements and physical evidence against Flowers are too weak to convict him. A jailhouse informant who claimed Flowers had confessed to him recanted in recorded telephone conversations with American Public Media’s “In the Dark” podcast. A separate appeal is pending in state court questioning Flowers’ actual guilt, citing in part evidence that reporters for “In the Dark” detailed.

J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press file photo Attorney Sheri Johnson leaves the Supreme Court after challenging a Mississippi prosecutor’s decision to keep African-Americans off the jury in the trial of Curtis Flowers, in Washington, in this March 20 photo. The Supreme Court is throwing out the murder conviction and death sentence for Flowers because of a prosecutor’s efforts to keep African Americans off the jury.