The US Supreme Court on Friday threw out the 2010 murder conviction of a black Mississippi death row inmate who was tried six times for the same crime by the same prosecutor, ruling that the white prosecutor unconstitutionally kept African Americans off the jury.
In the 7-2 ruling, the court found that the prosecutor violated the constitutional rights of 49-year-old Curtis Flowers, who was convicted of murdering four people at a furniture store in 1996 and has been in jail for more than 22 years.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the court’s majority opinion, which ruled that prosecutors “engaged in dramatically disparate questioning of black and white prospective jurors” at Flowers’ sixth trial.
“The numbers speak loudly,” Kavanaugh said in a summary of the opinion that he read aloud in the courtroom.
The court’s newest justice noted that Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans had removed 41 of 42 prospective black jurors over Flowers’ six trials. “We cannot ignore that history,” he wrote.
Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
In the sixth trial of Flowers, there were 11 white jurors and only one black juror.
Evans had rejected five prospective black jurors.
Flowers — whose case was the subject of the second season of the award-winning “In the Dark” podcast — was found guilty in his first three trials, but those convictions were tossed out by Mississippi’s top court.
His first trial had an all-white jury and the other two had just one black juror. There were several black jurors in his fourth and fifth trials — both of which ended when without a verdict, since jurors could not reach a unanimous decision.
Flowers’ lawyers have accused Evans of racial bias in his removal of black jurors and said his patterns violated the Supreme Court’s decision in Batson v. Kentucky in 1986.
In that decision, the high court ruled that people cannot be excluded from a jury because of their race.
Evans has said he excluded the potential black jurors for non-racial reasons.
In dissent, Thomas, the court’s only black justice, called Kavanaugh’s opinion “manifestly incorrect” and wrote that Flowers “presented no evidence whatsoever of purposeful race discrimination by the State in selecting the jury during the trial below.”
He added: “If the court’s opinion today has a redeeming quality, it is this: The state is perfectly free to convict Curtis Flowers again.”
Flowers, who remains in state custody, could face a seventh trial.
With Post wires