Curtis Flowers

State District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted all six of Flower's trials.[15] 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.[16][17]

The fourth (2007) and fifth (2008) ended in hung juries.[16] The sixth (2010) resulted in a conviction, and an appeal failed.[16][17][10]

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.[16][18] The following year the state court confirmed the original decision.[10][16] The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Flowers' conviction in 2019 because of Evans' efforts to keep black people off the jury.[18] 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.[17][15] In 2020, it was announced that charges would be dropped against Flowers.[19]

Flowers was first tried in 1997, before Judge Clarence E. Morgan III.[10] The prosecutor decided to try Flowers for the death of the store owner, Bertha Tardy,[10] as occurring in the course of a robbery. This would increase the penalty for conviction, making the defendant eligible for the death penalty.[20] 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.[21]

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.[13] Forensic evidence revealed gunpowder residue on Flowers' hand.[13][22] $400 was found to be missing from the till, and $235 was found in Flowers' headboard.[22] 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.[23] Flowers denied this.[24] 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.[23] 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.[24]

Flowers maintained that he was innocent of the murders[25] and said he never admitted any crimes to his cellmates.[24] He stated he had simply stopped going to the job and did not know he had been fired.[26] 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.[24] In 1997 he was convicted of the murder of the store owner by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.[16]

The conviction verdict in the first trial was overturned in 2000 by the Mississippi Supreme Court after Flowers appealed.[10][16] 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.[24][27] In addition, the prosecutor was held to have asked questions "not in good faith" and "without basis in fact."[24] The court remanded the case for a re-trial.[24]

While the first case was still under appeal,[29] prosecutors initiated a second trial for the murder of employee Derrick Stewart at the Tardy store.[10] Morgan was the judge again;[10] one black person was on the jury.[16][10] Scheduled for September 1998, the court granted the defense 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 March 22, 1999.[29] Flowers was convicted on March 30 and sentenced to death.[29] 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.[10][29][16]

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.[10] 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.[10][16] 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[30]).[31] 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.[31] Evans then used the state's three alternate juror strikes to exclude African-Americans.[31] The final jury consisted of one African-American and 11 whites.[10][16] (The county population is 45% African American.[32])

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

At the fourth trial, before Morgan in 2007 on four counts of murder,[10] the prosecution did not seek the death penalty[33] on the request of family of the victims who, aware that the defense 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'.[20] Evans exhausted the state's peremptory challenges in jury selection striking off black candidates;[34] the resulting jury, however, had five African Americans on it.[16][35] 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.[16][36][37]

The prosecution sought the death penalty for Flowers for the four murders in his fifth trial, which took place in 2008.[38] This time Joseph Loper sat as judge.[10] On the first day of testimony, an alternate juror, the only black woman on the jury,[11] was arrested for perjury for lying during jury selection when she said she did not know Flowers.[38][39] The trial, with a jury of nine white and three black jurors, concluded in 2008 in a mistrial due to a hung jury.[16][17] James Bibbs, an African American, was the sole juror opposed to conviction. Immediately after the trial the judge, Joseph Loper, accused Bibbs of perjury[40] for having lied during jury selection.[41][42] 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.[41] Loper was also recused as judge in Bibbs' trial.[42]

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,[16][10] and presided over by Judge Loper.[10] Following 30 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Flowers guilty of four counts of capital murder.[20] 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.[10][16]