Curtis Flowers, whose convictions in the killing of four people were repeatedly overturned, has died in Mississippi. His attorney said he was 56.
Curtis Flowers died Wednesday at his home in Winona, Mississippi. His family confirmed his death, attorney Rob McDuff, a member of his defense team, told CBS News on Thursday. Flowers was 56. No cause of death was given.
The case against Flowers began with the July 1996 killings of four people at Tardy Furniture. The victims were the store owner, a bookkeeper, a deliveryman and a 16-year-old. Flowers had worked briefly at the store but stopped showing up after three days. Police questioned him after the murders but did not arrest him then. He was arrested in Texas in January 1997 after moving there to live with his sister. He had no prior criminal record.
An all-White jury convicted Flowers after about an hour of deliberation at his first trial. He was 27 and was sentenced to death. He was then tried five more times for the same killings by the same district attorney, Doug Evans. Four convictions were overturned and two trials ended without a verdict. In 2010, Evans secured a conviction at the sixth trial, returning Flowers to death row.
The murder weapon was never found. No DNA or fingerprints linked Flowers to the crime. American Public Media’s “In the Dark” podcast re-examined the case. Its investigation led witnesses, including a man who said Flowers had confessed, to recant their testimony. The journalists also analyzed decades of court records and found that Evans excluded Black prospective jurors at a disproportionate rate.
In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors and the state of Mississippi had violated Flowers’ constitutional rights and overturned his conviction. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that there had been a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.” Across Flowers’ trials, 61 of 72 jurors were White, and all 61 voted to convict. Flowers was released on bail six months after the ruling. By then he had spent 23 years in prison.