Supreme Court sides with death row inmate over jury’s racial makeup

June 21, 2019

The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the conviction of a black Mississippi death row inmate who has been tried six times in the 1996 killings of four people at a Mississippi furniture store. Lawyers for 49-year-old Curtis Flowers have argued that the local prosecutor consistently kept black jurors off the jury in violation of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court tried to end discrimination in the composition of juries in 1986, but it has been harder to root out in practice.

The jury that convicted Flowers most recently was made up of 11 white jurors and one African-American. District Attorney Doug Evans struck five other African-Americans from the jury pool in the process.

Mississippi’s top court had twice upheld Flowers’ conviction and sentence, even after the Supreme Court ordered it to re-examine the case for possible racial discrimination in 2016.

This is a developing story and will be updated.