Curtis Flowers' conviction overturned over removal of black jurors

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/jun/22/curtis-flowers-conviction-supreme-court-removal-of-black-jurors

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The supreme court has thrown out the murder conviction and death sentence of a black man in Mississippi because of a prosecutor’s efforts to keep African Americans off the jury.

The justices ruled 7-2 that the removal of black prospective jurors had deprived Curtis Flowers of a fair trial.

The defendant has already been tried six times and could face a seventh trial.

The long record of Flowers’ trials stretching back more than 20 years shows district attorney Doug Evans’s “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals”, with the goal of an all-white jury, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote.

In Flowers’ sixth trial, the jury was made up of 11 white people and one African American. The prosecutor Evans struck off five black prospective jurors.

Of Flowers’ earlier trials, three convictions were thrown out, including one when the prosecutor improperly excluded African Americans from the jury. In his second trial, the judge chided Evans for disallowing a juror based on race. The other two ended when jurors could not reach unanimous verdicts. “The numbers speak loudly,” Kavanaugh said, in a summary of his opinion that he read in the courtroom, noting that Evans had removed 41 of the 42 prospective black jurors over the six trials. “We cannot ignore that history.”

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas called Kavanaugh’s opinion “manifestly incorrect” and wrote that Flowers “presented no evidence whatsoever of purposeful race discrimination”. Justice Neil Gorsuch joined most of Thomas’ opinion.

Thomas, the only African American supreme court justice, said the decision may have one redeeming quality: “The state is perfectly free to convict Curtis Flowers again.” Flowers has been in jail for more than 22 years, since his arrest a few months after four people were found shot to death in a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi in July 1996.Flowers was described by prosecutors as a disgruntled former employee who sought revenge against the store’s owner because she fired him and withheld most of his pay to cover the cost of merchandise he damaged. Nearly $300 was found missing after the killings. Defence lawyers have argued that witness statements and physical evidence against Flowers are too weak to convict him. In the course of selecting a jury, lawyers can excuse a juror merely because of a suspicion that a particular person would vote against their client. Those are called peremptory strikes, and they have been the focus of the complaints about discrimination.

The supreme court tried to stamp out discrimination in the composition of juries in Batson v Kentucky in 1986. The court ruled then that jurors could not be excused from service because of their race and set up a system by which trial judges could evaluate claims of discrimination and the race-neutral explanations by prosecutors. Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the nation’s pre-eminent civil rights attorney, was part of the Batson case majority, but he said the only way to end discrimination in jury selection was to eliminate peremptory strikes.

Flowers’ case had been to the high court before. In 2016, the justices ordered Mississippi’s top court to re-examine racial bias issues in Flowers’ case after a high court ruling in favour of a Georgia inmate because of a racially discriminatory jury. But the Mississippi justices divided 5-4 in upholding the verdict against Flowers. The state, defending the conviction, said the justices must narrow the focus from Evans’ broader record to the case at hand.But Kavanaugh said that even on the narrower basis, there is evidence that at least one prospective black juror for the sixth trial, Carolyn Wright, was similarly situated to white jurors and was improperly excused by Evans. “The trial court clearly erred in ruling that the state’s peremptory strike of Wright was not motivated in substantial part by discriminatory intent,” Kavanaugh wrote.