Curtis Flowers, a Black Mississippi man tried six times by the same prosecutor for a 1996 quadruple murder at a furniture store before the charges against him were dropped, died on Wednesday at his home in Winona. He was 56.
Mr. Flowers’s family confirmed that he died at his home, Rob McDuff, one of his lawyers, told CBS News on Thursday. Mr. McDuff gave no cause of death, and CBS News said it had reached out to the coroner.
His long prosecution began on a July morning in 1996, when four people — the owner of Tardy Furniture in Winona, a bookkeeper, a delivery man and a 16-year-old — were each shot in the head, execution-style.
Mr. Flowers had worked at the store briefly that summer and was let go after three days when he stopped showing up. Police questioned him after the killings but did not arrest him. He moved to Texas to live with his sister and was arrested there in January 1997. He had no criminal history. The murder weapon was never found, and no DNA or fingerprint evidence tied him to the crime.
At the first trial, an all-White jury convicted Mr. Flowers, then 27, after an hour of deliberation, and he was sentenced to death. That conviction was thrown out. So were the next two. Two more trials ended in mistrials. At the sixth, in 2010, District Attorney Doug Evans finally won a conviction that held, and Mr. Flowers went back to death row.
Mr. McDuff called the case “unprecedented in the history of the American legal system.” The first three convictions fell, he told 60 Minutes in 2021, “because of the prosecutor’s misrepresentation of the evidence to the jury and because of his discrimination in the selection of the jury.”
The case turned after reporters at American Public Media’s podcast In the Dark investigated it. Witnesses, including one who had testified that Mr. Flowers confessed, recanted their accounts. An analysis of decades of court data showed Mr. Evans excluding Black people from juries at a disproportionate rate. Of the 72 jurors across the six trials, 61 were White. All 61 voted to convict.
In 2019, the Supreme Court threw out the conviction again, ruling that Mr. Evans and the state had violated Mr. Flowers’s constitutional rights. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the court, described a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.” That December, Mr. Flowers was released on bail, leaving jail for the first time in 23 years, to await a seventh trial.
The seventh trial never came. Mr. Evans recused himself, and in September 2020 a Mississippi judge dismissed the charges with prejudice after the state attorney general, Lynn Fitch, declined to prosecute, according to WJTV, the Jackson television station. A judge later ordered the state to pay Mr. Flowers $500,000 in wrongful-imprisonment compensation.
“And I’m telling you, I felt like I was floating. I was just ready to go,” Mr. Flowers told CBS News in 2021, recalling the day he walked out of jail.