Justices ponder racism in Miss. case
Prosecutor’s actions at issue in six murder trials
WASHINGTON – After six trials for the same crime, a death row inmate from Mississippi reached the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday and appeared headed for yet another chance.
The justices spent an hour debating whether Curtis Flowers’ conviction in 2010 for the execution-style murders of four people in Winona, Mississippi, was tainted by a prosecutor’s rejection of potential black jurors. By the end of the hourlong oral argument, most justices seemed sure it was.
That would be unconstitutional under a Supreme Court precedent that preceded all six trials, three of which were reversed because of misconduct by the prosecutor. Two others resulted in hung juries.
“We can’t take the history out of the case,” Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh said.
Associate Justice Samuel Alito called the case “troubling,” with an “unusual and really disturbing history.” He said District Attorney Doug Evans’ conduct left “reasons to be suspicious.”
And those were just the conservatives.
All four of the high court’s liberal justices seemed swayed by the jury selection tactics of Evans, who handled all six of Flowers’ trials dating back two decades. Overall, 41 of 42 potential black jurors were struck.
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor said cases of prosecutorial misconduct and improper jury selection tactics showed “this man’s passion for this case.”
Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed concern that any decision declaring the jury selection in Flowers’ sixth trial unconstitutional might affect cases without an equally troubling history.
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas – asking questions for the first time in more than three years – noted that defense attorneys in the last trial struck only potential white jurors.
Though the question of Flowers’ guilt or innocence wasn’t before the justices, the subject of the oral argument – racial discrimination – has dominated his case from the start. Four juries that returned guilty verdicts were either allwhite or had few black jurors. Two trials with more black jurors ended in mistrials.
Flowers was first found guilty of killing four employees at a furniture store in 1997 and was sentenced to die. Three years later, the Mississippi Supreme Court threw out the conviction, leading to the decades-long legal saga.
Twice before, judges have found that Evans eliminated potential black jurors because of their race. In one case, the Mississippi Supreme Court cited “as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen.”
Even Jason Davis, arguing the case
for the Mississippi attorney general’s office, acknowledged that “the history in this case is troubling,” but he argued that none of the juror candidate eliminations in the sixth trial was tainted.
Among the justices, Alito came closest to defending Evans’ tactics in that trial. Without taking into consideration the prosecutor’s past behavior, Alito said, most of the jury eliminations in 2010 appeared legitimate. Some blacks in the jury pool knew the Flowers family, for instance, or had debts at the furniture store where the murders were committed.
Flowers, 48, is held at the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
An investigation by APM Reports’ podcast, “In The Dark,” found that over a 15-year period ending in 2017, the district attorney eliminated blacks from juries at more than four times the rate of whites.