The justices will be judging the prosecutor and whether he discriminated against potential jurors who are black.
By Robert Barnes Robert Barnes Reporter covering the U.S. Supreme Court Email Bio Follow March 15 at 8:30 PM WINONA, Miss. — Early one hot July morning in 1996, four people were executed in Tardy Furniture Store, a mainstay of this town’s compact business district. Months later, a man named Curtis Flowers, who had no criminal record but had very briefly worked at the store that summer, was arrested and charged.
The building in Winona, Miss., that once housed the Tardy Furniture Store. The case has attracted national attention — “Nobody gets tried six times but Curtis Flowers,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. A bipartisan group of former Justice Department officials and a national civil rights group have filed friend-of-the-court briefs on Flowers’s behalf.
The series of reports by “the podcast people,” as some refer to the reporters from American Public Media, have been unwelcome for some here. And so have the legal briefs reminding of Winona’s history with racially motivated crimes . Winona Police Chief Tommy Bibbs, who is black, takes a similar view. “That was then and this is now,” he said. He brings up the Confederate statue in front of the old courthouse — dedicated to “the Confederacy, President Jefferson Davis and the soldiers who fought for state rights” — only to dismiss its importance.Bibbs, who was not involved in Flowers’s arrest in 1996, said many of those who proclaim his innocence have not been to the trials or read the transcripts.
Rigby was quiet, and could usually be found at the counter, in the center of the store. Golden, the only African American victim, did what needed to be done around the store. He worked two jobs to provide for his family, which included a special-needs child. Rumors were rampant, and Beeland had left to run another newspaper, the Scott County Times, before prosecutors turned to Flowers, then 27, who was indicted in March 1997.
A group called Friends of Justice highlighted Flowers’s case. The Starz network series “Wrong Man” featured Flowers. The podcast brought even more attention and won a George Polk Award. When picking a jury, some are eliminated by the judge and lawyers for cause — that they are likely to be biased, for instance, or because they say in a capital case that they could not impose the death penalty.
Flowers’s lawyers said that means looking at Evans’s work in previous trials, not just the most recent one. Evans’s past behavior is not relevant, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood told the Supreme Court in defending the conviction.
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