Six Trials, One Man: Curtis Flowers and the Fight Against Racial Jury Exclusion

Curtis Flowers died at his Mississippi home on October 7, 2026, aged 56. His family confirmed his death through attorney Rob McDuff; the cause had not been released in the October 7–8 reports. Flowers had survived nearly 23 years of wrongful imprisonment and six prosecutions for the same killings. His death makes the question at the center of his case more urgent: what does a constitutional promise mean when officials can evade it for decades? Reporting: https://mississippitoday.org/2026/10/07/curtis-flowers-wrongly-imprisoned-enduring-six-trials-dead-at-56/ and https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/2026/10/08/curtis-flowers-death/

Six trials, nearly 23 years

On July 16, 1996, four people were killed at Tardy Furniture in Winona, Mississippi: Bertha Tardy, Robert Golden, Carmen Rigby and Derrick Stewart. Flowers, a former employee, maintained his innocence. District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted him six times. Four trials produced convictions and death sentences that were overturned; the fourth and fifth ended in hung juries. Flowers remained imprisoned while awaiting retrials. The first two convictions were reversed for prosecutorial misconduct, the third for racial discrimination in jury selection, and the sixth ultimately fell at the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court's ruling addressed jury discrimination, not a finding about who committed the murders. Court record: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-9572

The Court decided Flowers v. Mississippi on June 21, 2019, by 7–2. Flowers was released on bail in December 2019. After Evans recused himself and the attorney general's office took over, the charges were dismissed with prejudice in September 2020—ending that prosecution, not merely postponing a seventh trial. APM Reports' In the Dark investigation exposed serious weaknesses in the evidence, including unreliable witness and jailhouse-informant accounts. Investigation: https://features.apmreports.org/in-the-dark/season-two/

Video: "You Can't Make This Up" — Flowers' attorney Sheri Lynn Johnson discusses the case after the 2014 Mississippi Supreme Court argument (WeAllBeTV, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBtsMpgxVE8). News report of his release: CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/video/curtis-flowers-tried-6-times-for-same-killing-released-on-bail/

How jury selection works

A jury pool is questioned in a process called voir dire. A challenge for cause asks the judge to excuse someone for a demonstrated reason such as bias or legal disqualification. A peremptory challenge is a limited strike that ordinarily does not require the lawyer to prove cause. But discretion is not permission to discriminate: race-based peremptory strikes violate equal protection. A defendant is entitled to nondiscriminatory selection, not a guarantee of a particular racial composition or verdict.

Before Batson, Swain v. Alabama (1965) imposed a formidable evidentiary burden: proof that a prosecutor excluded Black jurors systematically across cases, not simply discriminatory strikes in the defendant's own trial. The presumption favoring peremptory strikes made discrimination extraordinarily difficult to challenge. Batson v. Kentucky (1986) rejected that across-cases requirement and allowed a claim based on the circumstances of one trial. Swain: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/380/202/ ; Batson: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/476/79/

Batson today: three steps, not just a neutral-sounding answer

Step 1 — Raise an inference of discrimination. The objecting party identifies circumstances suggesting a strike was based on race: a pattern of exclusions, disparate questioning, statements, or other relevant evidence. A pattern is useful but not mandatory; even one intentionally discriminatory strike is unconstitutional.

Step 2 — Require a race-neutral explanation. The party using the strike must state a reason not expressly based on race. At this stage the explanation need not be persuasive or even plausible; that limited threshold is not a finding that it is true. Purkett v. Elem (1995) makes this distinction important: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/514/765/

Step 3 — Decide whether the explanation is pretext. The judge must evaluate the actual reason for the strike, considering credibility, comparisons with accepted jurors, questioning, the record and relevant history. A superficially neutral reason can conceal purposeful discrimination. If Black and white jurors share the supposed problem but only the Black juror is struck, that unequal treatment can expose the explanation. Batson remains the federal constitutional baseline; state law may impose additional protections. Flowers explains the framework and its application: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-9572

How Evans used ostensibly race-neutral explanations

Across Flowers’ six trials, 61 of the 72 seated jurors were white, according to Trip Gabriel’s October 9, 2026 New York Times obituary, republished by The Philadelphia Inquirer. This measures the composition of the seated juries across all six trials; it is distinct from the Supreme Court’s figure for Black prospective jurors excluded through strikes. Obituary: https://www.inquirer.com/obituaries/obit-curtis-flowers-20261009.html

The Flowers majority did not simply count jurors. It examined the prosecution's history, the sixth trial's strike pattern, unequal questioning, comparisons between jurors, and inaccurate explanations together. The State acknowledged that it had struck 41 of the 42 Black prospective jurors it could have struck across the trials for which strike information was available. The opinion notes that racial information about prospective jurors in the fifth trial was unavailable. This is a statistic about prospective-juror strikes, not a count of everyone seated on the six juries. Court opinion, Parts I and III: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-9572

In the sixth trial, Evans struck five of the six qualified Black prospective jurors; the jury had 11 white members and one Black member. The majority emphasized that seating one Black juror did not cure discrimination against another. It also found markedly unequal questioning: the five struck Black prospective jurors received 145 individual questions, while the 11 seated white jurors received 12 in total. Intensive questioning can generate reasons to exclude one group while comparable concerns in another group remain unexplored. The Court treated that disparity as evidence in the overall inquiry, not an automatic numerical rule. Opinion, Part III-C: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-9572

Carolyn Wright provided the decisive comparison. The State cited her connections to defense witnesses and her employment at Wal-Mart, where Flowers' father had worked. Wright knew 34 people connected with the case. Yet white prospective jurors Pamela Chesteen, Harold Waller and Bobby Lester knew 31, 18 and 27 people respectively, and the State asked them no individual follow-up questions about those connections. If knowing witnesses truly created concern about impartiality, why not investigate the white jurors' connections too?

The Wal-Mart explanation also deserved scrutiny. There was no evidence that Wright and Flowers' father actually worked together or were close, and the prosecution did not individually investigate the relationship. White jurors had Flowers-family connections too: Chesteen had provided banking services to family members, and Lester worked at the bank where the father was a customer. Those relationships did not prompt comparable follow-up questioning. The objection was not that witness or family connections can never justify a strike; it was that the State applied its supposed concern unevenly. Opinion, Part III-D: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-9572

The State also incorrectly asserted that Wright had worked with one of Flowers' sisters. The majority identified other apparently inaccurate explanations for Black-juror strikes as additional evidence of intent when considered with the rest of the record. It held that the trial judge clearly erred in accepting Wright's strike as nondiscriminatory. The ruling did not separately declare every sixth-trial strike unlawful. Its central lesson is that a race-neutral label is not enough when the facts expose unequal treatment. Opinion, Part III-D: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-9572

The case-law path: exclusion, evasion and enforcement

Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), 100 U.S. 303 — A law limiting jury service to white men violated equal protection. Removing an explicit racial bar did not eliminate later discretionary exclusion. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/100/303/

Norris v. Alabama (1935), 294 U.S. 587 — In the Scottsboro litigation, systematic exclusion of Black citizens from jury service violated equal protection even without an openly exclusionary statute. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/294/587/

Brown v. Mississippi (1936), 297 U.S. 278 — Convictions resting on confessions extracted by state officers through torture violated due process. This was a coerced-confession case, not a Batson case; it belongs here because racial injustice operated both in gathering evidence and in selecting those who judged it. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/297/278/

Swain v. Alabama (1965), 380 U.S. 202 — Required proof of systematic discriminatory peremptory strikes across cases, creating the difficult pre-Batson barrier. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/380/202/

Batson v. Kentucky (1986), 476 U.S. 79 — Allowed a defendant to establish purposeful racial discrimination from jury selection in the defendant's own case and created the familiar three-step inquiry. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/476/79/

Powers v. Ohio (1991), 499 U.S. 400 — A defendant may challenge racial exclusion even when the excluded juror and defendant are different races; the excluded juror has an equal-protection right too. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/499/400/

Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co. (1991), 500 U.S. 614 — Applied the prohibition to private litigants' peremptory strikes in civil trials. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/500/614/

Georgia v. McCollum (1992), 505 U.S. 42 — Criminal defendants, not just prosecutors, may not exercise racially discriminatory peremptory strikes. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/42/

J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B. (1994), 511 U.S. 127 — Extended equal-protection limits on peremptory strikes to discrimination based on sex. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/511/127/

Purkett v. Elem (1995), 514 U.S. 765 — Distinguished the limited race-neutral explanation required at step two from the ultimate credibility and discrimination decision at step three. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/514/765/

Miller-El v. Dretke (2005), 545 U.S. 231 — Comparative juror analysis, disparate questioning, jury-shuffling practices and historical evidence exposed discriminatory strikes. Similar traits in accepted white jurors can undermine explanations for excluding Black jurors. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/545/231/

Snyder v. Louisiana (2008), 552 U.S. 472 — Reversed after finding discriminatory exclusion of a Black juror; a supposedly neutral concern about his student-teaching obligations did not withstand scrutiny and comparison. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/552/472/

Foster v. Chatman (2016), 578 U.S. 488 — The prosecution's files, including racial highlighting and annotations, undermined its claimed neutral explanations and demonstrated discriminatory intent. The correct case name is Chatman, not Chapman. The Supreme Court also sent Flowers' case back for reconsideration in light of Foster before its eventual 2019 ruling. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/578/14-8349/

Flowers v. Mississippi (2019), 588 U.S. 284 — Evaluated the full history and sixth-trial evidence together and reversed because the strike of Carolyn Wright was motivated in substantial part by discriminatory intent. The decision enforces Batson; it does not replace the three-step framework. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/588/17-9572/ ; official opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-9572_k536.pdf

These are major landmarks relevant to Flowers, not an exhaustive list of every jury-selection decision or an assertion that all pending litigation is covered.

Brown v. Mississippi: another mechanism of racial injustice

Brown involved three Black defendants—Ed Brown, Henry Shields and Yank Ellington—whose murder convictions depended on confessions obtained through brutality, including whipping and hanging. The Supreme Court held that state-sponsored torture could not produce constitutionally valid convictions. Flowers involved a different mechanism: excluding Black jurors and presenting evidence that investigative reporting later challenged. Comparing the cases reveals how constitutional safeguards must constrain the entire process, from interrogation to the jury box; it does not imply that Flowers' case involved the same coerced confessions. Read the Brown opinion: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/297/278/

Walter McMillian and Just Mercy

Walter McMillian—the correct spelling of his surname—was a Black man wrongly convicted in Alabama of killing Ronda Morrison. Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative exposed false testimony and suppressed exculpatory evidence; McMillian was exonerated in 1993 after six years on death row. An overwhelmingly white jury recommended life imprisonment, but the trial judge imposed death through judicial override. His case anchors Stevenson's book Just Mercy and the film adaptation. EJI's case history: https://eji.org/cases/walter-mcmillian/

Flowers and McMillian shared more than geography: unreliable prosecution evidence, racialized assumptions, years under a death sentence, and the long labor of lawyers and advocates before freedom. But their legal paths differed. McMillian's reversal and eventual exoneration centered on evidence and disclosure failures; Flowers' Supreme Court victory centered on purposeful racial exclusion during jury selection, followed by dismissal of charges in 2020. Judicial override in McMillian's case was a further injustice not to be confused with Evans's strikes. Neither man's story should be reduced to a film-like ending in which release repairs everything. EJI: https://eji.org/cases/walter-mcmillian/ ; Flowers investigation: https://features.apmreports.org/in-the-dark/season-two/

Compensation cannot return the lost years

On March 2, 2021—not 2023—Mississippi Circuit Judge George Mitchell ordered the state to pay Flowers $500,000, with the attorney general's office not opposing the judgment. The award was to be paid at $50,000 a year over ten years, the statutory maximum. Although Flowers lost nearly 23 years, the law capped compensation at ten years. The payment schedule should not be mistaken for confirmation that he received the entire sum before his death. Contemporary reporting: https://www.apmreports.org/story/2021/03/02/mississippi-to-pay-curtis-flowers-500000-settlement-for-decades-behind-bars and https://apnews.com/article/us-supreme-court-trials-mississippi-courts-54a760b40c4f675983a75e3488811e3e

Conclusion: justice must mean more than a belated reversal

From Strauder and Norris to Batson and Flowers, the struggle has been to make equal citizenship real in the jury box. The method of exclusion changed: an openly racial restriction could give way to a discretionary strike defended with a neutral-sounding explanation. Miller-El, Foster and Flowers show why courts must look beyond that explanation to comparisons, questioning, records and history. A constitutional rule has little protective force if a judge accepts its appearance while overlooking its evasion.

Brown v. Mississippi and Walter McMillian’s story reveal related but distinct dangers. Brown addressed convictions built on tortured confessions; McMillian’s case exposed false testimony, withheld evidence and judicial override; Flowers’ Supreme Court victory addressed discriminatory jury selection. These are not interchangeable legal claims. Together, however, they show how injustice can enter at different stages and reinforce itself—from the construction of the prosecution’s case to the selection of jurors and the imposition of punishment. Protecting one stage cannot excuse failures at another.

Flowers’ ordeal also challenges the comforting idea that release completes the work of justice. Six trials and nearly 23 lost years cannot be returned by a reversal, dismissal or a capped compensation award. His death in October 2026 gives that loss a finality no payment can undo. Remembering him alongside McMillian means honoring the people, families, lawyers and journalists who fought for freedom while refusing to treat their extraordinary persistence as a substitute for a fair system.

The enduring lesson is not simply that courts can correct injustice. It is that prosecutors must select jurors without discrimination, judges must test explanations against the evidence, and officials must disclose reliable evidence and answer for misconduct before lives are consumed by repeated proceedings. Equal justice requires prevention, timely enforcement and meaningful repair—not merely recognition after the damage has been done.