Curtis Giovanni Flowers (born May 29, 1970) is an American man who was wrongly imprisoned for over 22 years while he was tried for the same murders six times by the same prosecutor in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Four of the trials resulted in convictions, all of which were overturned on appeal for repeated prosecutorial misconduct. Flowers was alleged to have committed the July 16, 1996, shootings of four people inside Tardy Furniture store in Winona, Mississippi, United States. Flowers was first convicted in 1997; in five of the six trials, the prosecutor, Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans, sought the death penalty against Flowers. As a result, Flowers was held on death row at the Parchman division of Mississippi State Penitentiary for over 20 years.
In his first trial, Flowers was convicted of the aggravated murder and robbery of the store owner. This verdict and a conviction in a second trial for the murder of one of the store employees were both overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct. A subsequent trial for all four murders resulted in conviction, but this was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court for racial bias by the prosecutor in jury selection: Flowers is black and the prosecution excluded a disproportionate number of black jurors. Flowers's fourth and fifth trials ended as mistrials. On June 18, 2010, a majority-white jury in Flowers's sixth trial convicted him of the 1996 murders and voted to impose a death sentence.
Flowers's case was one of three that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2016 were to be remanded to lower courts to be reviewed for evidence of racial bias in jury selection. After the Mississippi Supreme Court reaffirmed the conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court again reviewed Flowers's case. It overturned, on a 7–2 vote, the murder convictions in June 2019 in the decision Flowers v. Mississippi, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing for the majority. In December 2019, Flowers was released from prison for the first time since his original arrest, on $250,000 bond, pending a state decision on whether it would attempt another prosecution. On September 4, 2020, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a Republican who had taken over the case from District Attorney Evans, announced she would not seek a seventh trial and had dropped the charges against Flowers.
The Flowers case served as the subject of a 2018 podcast, In the Dark, on American Public Media. In early 2021, Flowers was awarded $500,000—the maximum allowed under Mississippi law providing compensation for wrongful incarceration. Under the agreed order, Mississippi was ordered to pay Flowers $50,000 per year for the next 10 years.
Case On the morning of July 16, 1996, a retired employee of Tardy Furniture entered the store and found three bodies: owner Bertha Tardy and employees Robert Golden and Carmen Rigby were deceased. A third employee, Derrick Stewart, who was 16 at the time, died later at the hospital. All had been fatally shot. Curtis Flowers was suspected after police learned that he had been fired from the store 13 days prior to the murders. He also owed Bertha Tardy $30 for a cash advance on his paycheck.
Certain eyewitnesses said they saw Flowers near the front of the store on the morning of the shootings. No gun was found, but bullets from the scene were determined to be the same caliber as a gun that had been stolen from Flowers's uncle's car the same day as the murders. The Mississippi Crime Lab found that bullets fired previously from the uncle's gun matched the ballistics evidence of bullets found at the murder scene. Flowers was charged with murder in the shooting deaths of the four victims.
Trials and state-court appeals Summary State District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted all six of Flowers's trials. 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.
The fourth (2007) and fifth (2008) ended in hung juries. The sixth (2010) resulted in a conviction, and an appeal failed.
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. The following year the state court confirmed the original decision. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Flowers's conviction in 2019 because of Evans' efforts to keep black people off the jury. 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. In 2020, it was announced that charges would be dropped against Flowers.
First trial and appeals (1997–2000) Trial 1: Oct. 1997 Judge Clarence E. Morgan III Murder counts: 1 (Bertha Tardy) Prosecution: Doug Evans Jury: All white Defense: John Gilmore; Billy Gilmore Outcome: Guilty. Sentenced to death Appeal: Conviction overturned in 2000 by Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct
Flowers was first tried in 1997, before Judge Clarence E. Morgan III. The prosecutor decided to try Flowers for the death of the store owner, Bertha Tardy, as occurring in the course of a robbery. This would increase the penalty for conviction, making the defendant eligible for the death penalty. 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.
In addition, prosecution witnesses testified that projectiles found at the crime scene were most likely from a .380-caliber pistol, the same as a gun stolen from Flowers's uncle on the morning of the murders. Forensic evidence revealed gunpowder residue on Flowers's hand. $400 was found to be missing from the till, and $235 was found in Flowers's headboard. According to two of Flowers's cellmates in the first jail in which he was held, Flowers admitted to them that he had stolen the money and committed the murders. Flowers denied this. Of the original two witnesses to the confession, both later retracted their testimony. 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.
Flowers maintained that he was innocent of the murders and said he never admitted any crimes to his cellmates. He stated he had simply stopped going to the job and did not know he had been fired. 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. In 1997 he was convicted of the murder of the store owner by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.
The conviction verdict in the first trial was overturned in 2000 by the Mississippi Supreme Court after Flowers appealed. 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. In addition, the prosecutor was held to have asked questions "not in good faith" and "without basis in fact." The court remanded the case for a re-trial.
Second trial and appeals (1999–2003) Trial 2: March 1999 Judge Clarence E. Morgan III Murder counts: 1 (Derrick "Bobo" Stewart) Prosecution: Doug Evans Jury: 11 white, 1 black Defense: Chokwe Lumumba; Harvey Freelon Outcome: Guilty. Sentenced to death Appeal: Conviction overturned in 2003 by Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct.
While the first case was still under appeal, prosecutors initiated a second trial for the murder of employee Derrick Stewart at the Tardy store. Morgan was the judge again; one black person was on the jury. 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. Flowers was convicted on March 30 and sentenced to death. 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.
Third trial and appeals (2004–2007) Trial 3: Feb. 2004 Judge Clarence E. Morgan III Murder counts: 4 Prosecution: Doug Evans Jury: 11 white, 1 black Defense: Ray Charles Carter; Andre de Gruy; Stacy Ferraro Outcome: Guilty. Sentenced to death Appeal: Conviction overturned in 2007 by Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecution's racial discrimination in jury selection.
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. 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. 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). 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. Archived 25 March 2017 Evans then used the state's three alternate juror strikes to exclude African-Americans. The final jury consisted of one African-American and 11 whites. (The county population is 45% African American.)
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, saying there had been "as strong [a] case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge".
Fourth trial (2007) Trial 4: Nov. 2007 Judge Clarence E. Morgan III Murder counts: 4 Prosecution: Doug Evans Jury: 7 white, 5 black Defense: Ray Charles Carter; Andre de Gruy Outcome: Mistrial (hung jury)
At the fourth trial, before Morgan in 2007 on four counts of murder, the prosecution did not seek the death penalty 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'. Evans exhausted the state's peremptory challenges in jury selection striking off black candidates; the resulting jury, however, had five African Americans on it. 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.
Fifth trial (2008)