Curtis Flowers, Mississippi Man Tried Six Times for a 1996 Murder Spree, Dies at 56
The Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2019 after finding prosecutors tried to purge Black jurors. His attorney said he died at home in Winona.
Curtis Flowers, the Mississippi man whose six trials for a quadruple murder became one of the most scrutinized prosecutions in American legal history, has died at 56. His family said he died Wednesday at his home in Winona, according to his attorney, Rob McDuff, who was part of Flowers' legal team and told CBS News on Thursday. No cause of death was given, and CBS has contacted the coroner.
The case began on a July morning in 1996 in Winona, when four people were shot in the head in execution-style killings: the owner of Tardy Furniture, a bookkeeper, a delivery man and a 16-year-old. Flowers had worked briefly at the store that summer but stopped showing up after three days. Police questioned him but did not arrest him then. He moved to Texas to live with his sister and was arrested there in January 1997. He had no prior criminal record.
McDuff called the case "unprecedented in the history of the American legal system." In the first trial, an all-White jury convicted Flowers after about an hour of deliberation, and Flowers, then 27, was sentenced to death. The murder weapon was never found, and no DNA or fingerprints linked him to the crime.
That conviction was overturned on appeal. Flowers was tried five more times by the same prosecutor, District Attorney Doug Evans. Three more convictions were overturned and two trials ended in mistrials. In 2010, a conviction from the sixth trial held, and Flowers returned to death row. McDuff told 60 Minutes in 2021 that the first three convictions were overturned because of the prosecutor's misrepresentation of evidence and discrimination in jury selection.
Reporters for American Public Media's podcast In the Dark examined the case. Their reporting led several witnesses, including one who had said Flowers confessed, to recant. The reporters also analyzed decades of court data showing that Evans excluded Black people from juries at a disproportionate rate. Across Flowers' trials, 61 of the 72 jurors were White, and all 61 voted to convict.
In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Evans and the state of Mississippi had violated Flowers' constitutional rights and overturned his conviction once more. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that there was a "relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals." About six months later, Flowers was released on bail, leaving jail for the first time in 23 years.
Flowers described his release to CBS News in 2021. "I felt like I was floating," he said. "I was just ready to go."
