Supreme Court to Review Mississippi Death-Penalty Case in Which Prosecutor Systematically Excluded Black Jurors

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review whether a prosecutor with a long history of racially discriminatory jury-selection practices unconstitutionally struck black jurors in the trial of Mississippi death-row prisoner Curtis Giovanni Flowers (pictured). On November 2, 2018, the Court granted certiorari in the Flowers’s case on the question of “[w]hether the Mississippi Supreme Court erred in how it applied Batson v. Kentucky,” the landmark 1986 Supreme Court decision barring the use of discretionary strikes to remove jurors on the basis of race.

Flowers has been tried six times for a notorious 1996 quadruple murder in Winona, Mississippi. He was prosecuted each time by Doug Evans, the District Attorney in Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit Court District since 1992. Flowers was convicted by all-white or nearly all-white juries based on questionable circumstantial evidence and the testimony of a jailhouse informant (who has since recanted) that Flowers had confessed to the murders. Court pleadings and the American Public Media (APM) podcast series, In the Dark, have cast doubt upon much of the evidence in the case, and a prominent pathologist who examined the autopsy reports and crime scene photograph has disputed the prosecution’s theory that the murder was committed by a single perpetrator.

In the Dark conducted a study of jury selection in the Fifth Circuit Court District during the 26-year period from 1992 to 2017 in which Evans was District Attorney, analyzing prosecutorial strikes or acceptances of more than 6,700 jurors in 225 trials. APM found that throughout Evans’s tenure, prosecutors struck prospective black jurors at nearly 4½ times the rate of white prospective jurors. In Flowers’s case, Evans struck nearly all of the African-American jurors in each trial. In his first three trials, the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned Flowers’s convictions because of prosecutorial misconduct, with courts finding that Evans had violated Batson in two of those trials. The fourth and fifth trials ended in mistrials. In the sixth trial, in June 2010, Evans accepted the first qualified African-American potential juror and then struck the five remaining African Americans in the jury pool. Flowers challenged the prosecution’s jury strikes on appeal, but the Mississippi Supreme Court, over the dissents of three justices, rejected his claim. In June 2016, the United States Supreme Court vacated the state court’s ruling and returned the case to the Mississippi Supreme Court to reconsider the issue in light of the Court’s decision one month earlier in Foster v. Chatman, finding that prosecutors in a Georgia capital case had unconstitutionally stricken jurors because they were black. However, over the dissents of three justices, the Mississippi Supreme Court again affirmed, writing that the prior adjudications that Evans had already twice violated Batson “do not undermine Evans’ race neutral reasons” for striking black jurors in the sixth trial and that “the historical evidence of past discrimination … does not alter our analysis.” The U.S. Supreme Court has not yet set a date for oral argument in the case.

(Jeff Amy, High court to hear Mississippi case on juror discrimination, Associated Press, November 2, 2018; Madeleine Baran and Parker Yesko, Supreme Court agrees to hear Curtis Flowers appeal, APM Reports, November 2, 2018; Jerry Mitchell, US Supreme Court will hear death row inmate Curtis Flowers’ review, Mississippi Clarion Register, November 2, 2018; Will Craft, Mississippi D.A. has long history of striking many blacks from juries, APM Reports, June 12, 2018; Jerry Mitchell, Is Curtis Flowers innocent? Pathologist thinks multiple killers behind quadruple murder, Mississippi Clarion Register, August 2, 2018.) See Supreme Court, Race, Prosecutorial Misconduct, and Innocence.