Curtis Flowers, the Mississippi man whose death sentence was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court, died Wednesday at his home in Mississippi at age 56. He had spent more than 22 years in prison after being tried six times in the July 1996 shooting deaths of four people in Winona, Mississippi.
U.S. Supreme Court Decision
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the court’s 7-2 decision in 2019 that the removal of Black prospective jurors deprived Flowers of a fair trial. During the sixth trial in 2010, he was sentenced to death before the ruling later set that conviction aside.
Flowers was 26 when he was arrested several months after the killings. The case moved through six trials, and the sixth one included 11 white jurors and one Black juror after District Attorney Doug Evans struck five Black prospective jurors.
Release in Mississippi
Flowers remained in prison for six months after the Supreme Court ruling because he was still under indictment. He was released in December 2019 after a judge set bond, and Mississippi dropped charges against him in September 2020.
After the charges were dropped, Flowers said, "Today, I am finally free from the injustice that left me locked in a box for nearly twenty three years" and, "I’ve been asked if I ever thought this day would come. I have been blessed with a family that never gave up on me and with them by my side, I knew it would."
2021 Lawsuit
In 2021, Flowers filed a lawsuit against Doug Evans and three investigators who worked with the district attorney. The lawsuit said they engaged in misconduct, including pressuring witnesses to fabricate claims about seeing Flowers in particular locations on the day of the murders and ignoring other possible suspects.
A judge also ordered Mississippi to pay Flowers $500,000 for wrongful imprisonment, the maximum under a state law that allows up to $50,000 a year for 10 years. His death closes a case that ended with release and compensation, but the challenge to how the prosecutions were handled remained part of the record until the end.
