Six prosecutions did not make the evidence against Curtis Flowers reliable. They made it urgent to ask who had tested that evidence, whose accounts had been accepted, and why the same man remained on death row. APM Reports’ In the Dark investigated those questions in its second season. Its work exposed distortions in the prosecution’s narrative without claiming to identify the person who killed four employees at Tardy Furniture in Winona, Mississippi, on July 16, 1996.
How the investigation began—and who did it
Madeleine Baran began reporting on Flowers in 2017. The central question was extraordinary: how could Mississippi try one Black man six times for the same crime, while convictions repeatedly failed on appeal? The team examined the prosecution rather than treating repetition as proof. Reporters worked in Mississippi, interviewed witnesses and relatives, gathered court and jury-selection records, and checked the alleged route, gun evidence and jailhouse confessions against documents and fresh interviews.
Baran was the host and lead reporter. Samara Freemark was co-creator, co-writer and managing producer. Parker Yesko and Will Craft were reporters; Craft’s data reporting helped turn jury-selection records into a measurable pattern. Natalie Jablonski produced the series, and Rehman Tungekar was associate producer. Curtis Gilbert, Tom Scheck and Britta Greene contributed additional reporting. Their work was supported by editors, photographers and audio specialists named in the addendum’s complete published production credits.
These journalists were not the original police investigators or Flowers’s defense counsel. Doug Evans was the district attorney responsible for the repeated prosecutions; John Johnson, an investigator for the district attorney’s office, figured prominently in the podcast’s examination of how the original inquiry focused on Flowers. Episode 9, “Why Curtis?,” examines that focus. Sheri Lynn Johnson argued Flowers’s Supreme Court appeal; Rob McDuff and Henderson Hill were among the lawyers involved in his defense. Reporting and legal representation were distinct efforts, not interchangeable roles.
1. Racial exclusion made visible through records
The team examined jury selection in more than 200 trials in Evans’s district between 1992 and 2017, collecting information on more than 6,700 prospective jurors. APM’s analysis found that prosecutors struck eligible Black prospective jurors at nearly 50 percent, compared with about 11 percent for white prospective jurors—roughly four and a half times as often. This describes the office’s broader record, not just Flowers’s juries.
Batson v. Kentucky (1986) forbids intentional racial discrimination in peremptory strikes. A neutral-sounding explanation does not settle whether a strike was discriminatory; judges must assess credibility and pretext. The reporters’ database supplied context for a practice that could otherwise appear as isolated decisions in separate courtrooms.
2. Forty-one of forty-two—and the limits of that number
In Flowers v. Mississippi (2019), the Supreme Court recorded that the State had struck 41 of the 42 Black prospective jurors it could have struck in the trials for which relevant information was available. The opinion notes that racial information for the fifth trial was unavailable. This is not a count of seated jurors across all six trials.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion described the State’s “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals.” The Court considered history, unequal questioning and comparisons between accepted white jurors and excluded Black jurors; it reversed because Carolyn Wright’s sixth-trial exclusion was substantially motivated by discriminatory intent. The Court decided a constitutional issue from the legal record. It did not rule that a podcast had solved the murders.
3. A central informant withdrew his story
Odell Hallmon testified in four trials that Flowers had confessed to him. In recorded conversations with the journalists, he said that testimony was untrue. His changing accounts and criminal history raised questions about reliability and the incentives surrounding jailhouse testimony. Episodes 5 and 6 examine both his history and his recantation.
A recantation must itself be tested; it is not automatically conclusive. But the prosecution’s repeated reliance on Hallmon could no longer be presented without confronting his later recorded denial. The distinction matters: reporters uncovered evidence that undermined a witness, rather than simply substituting a new certainty for an old one.
4. The alleged walking route was not a settled fact
Prosecutors assembled a narrative in which Flowers walked through Winona, obtained a gun, committed the killings and returned home. Episode 2 revisited the people said to have seen him. Accounts wavered on important details; the reporting also investigated witness pressure and the reward associated with the inquiry.
These findings do not mean that every witness knowingly lied. They show why investigators must preserve early statements, examine inconsistent versions and separate a witness’s memory from a theory supplied by officials. A sequence of repeated assertions is not the same as independent corroboration.
5. Physical evidence required scrutiny, not overstatement
Investigators never recovered the murder weapon. The prosecution nevertheless relied on a theory connecting the killings to a gun associated with Doyle Simpson; Episode 3 examined that theory and the ammunition comparisons. The series also scrutinized a shoe impression and the reported single particle of gunshot residue.
Such evidence must be evaluated for what it can actually establish. A reported residue particle or shoe-brand inference is not equivalent to a recovered weapon or a uniquely identifying match. The podcast challenged the strength of the links offered against Flowers, not the reality of the four murders.
6. Other leads—and the danger of a fixed theory
The series examined information about other possible suspects, including Willie James Hemphill, and asked why those leads had not been adequately pursued. Naming a person in records does not establish guilt. The finding was about investigative choices: an inquiry can become distorted when evidence is evaluated chiefly for whether it supports the suspect already selected.
Why this belongs in the history of racial justice
Ida B. Wells understood the pattern a century before Winona. Investigating lynching in Southern Horrors (1892), she wrote, "The men who commit these murders are the ones who write the reports." Her subject was the lynch mob and the press that excused it, but the insight reaches the courthouse: when the authorities who pursue a conviction also control the record of how it was obtained, the official account cannot be taken on faith. In the Dark continued Wells’s work through interviews, documents and data. Brown v. Mississippi addressed tortured confessions; Batson addressed discriminatory jury selection. Neither safeguard enforces itself.
Mississippi’s own history shows what is at stake. In 1955, an all-white jury in Sumner acquitted J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant of the murder of Emmett Till; months later, protected by double jeopardy, they confessed to the killing in Look magazine. In 1964, two all-white juries failed to convict Byron De La Beckwith for the assassination of Medgar Evers; only in 1994, before a racially mixed jury, was he finally found guilty. In each case, as in Flowers’s, the machinery of the Mississippi courts—who was allowed to sit in judgment, whose testimony was credited, which evidence was pursued—deliberately shaped the outcome before a verdict was ever read.
After the 2019 reversal, Flowers was released on bail that December. Mississippi’s attorney general’s office dismissed the charges in September 2020. Reporting, defense work and court decisions should each receive their own credit. But the central fact remains: Curtis Flowers’s life was consumed by six prosecutions that rested on distorted evidence and racially engineered juries. The lesson is not that every distortion can be proved deliberate in every detail; it is that a system which repeatedly produced those distortions, in the same district, under the same prosecutor, cannot be described as a series of innocent mistakes.
Read the companion essay: Six Trials, One Man: Curtis Flowers and the Fight Against Racial Jury Exclusion.
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