Curtis Flowers

Curtis Giovanni Flowers (born May 29, 1970) is an American man who was tried for murder six times in the U.S. state of Mississippi.

Four of the trials resulted in convictions, all of which were overturned on appeal.

Flowers was alleged to have committed the July 16, 1996, shooting deaths of four people inside Tardy Furniture store in Winona, seat of Montgomery County.

On the morning of July 16, 1996, a retired employee of Tardy Furniture entered the store and found four bodies: owner Bertha Tardy, and three employees, Robert Golden, Carmen Rigby, and Derrick Stewart, who was 16 at the time of his murder.

All had been fatally shot.

Curtis Flowers was suspected after police learned that he had been fired from the store 13 days prior to the murders.

He also owed Bertha Tardy $30 for a cash advance on his paycheck.

Certain eyewitnesses said they saw Flowers near the front of the store on the morning of the shootings.

No gun was found, but bullets from the scene were determined to be the same caliber as a gun that had been stolen from Flowers' uncle's car the same day as the murders.

The Mississippi Crime Lab found that bullets fired previously from the uncle's gun matched the ballistics evidence of bullets found at the murder scene.

Flowers was charged with murder in the shooting deaths of the four victims.

State District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted all six of Flowers' trials.

Flowers was first convicted in 1997; in five of the six trials, the prosecutor, Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans, sought the death penalty against Flowers.

As a result, Flowers was held on death row at the Parchman division of Mississippi State Penitentiary for over 20 years.

In his first trial, Flowers was convicted of the aggravated murder and robbery of the store owner.

This verdict and a conviction in a second trial for the murder of one of the store employees were both overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct.

A subsequent trial for all four murders resulted in conviction, but this was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court for racial bias by the prosecutor in jury selection: Flowers is black and the prosecution excluded a disproportionate number of black jurors.

Flowers' fourth and fifth trials ended as mistrials.

The first through third trials (1997, 1999, 2004) ended in convictions but were overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court – the first two because of prosecutorial misconduct; the third because District Attorney Evans was found to have discriminated against black jurors during jury selection.

Flowers was first tried in 1997, before Judge Clarence E. Morgan III.

The prosecutor decided to try Flowers for the death of the store owner, Bertha Tardy, as occurring in the course of a robbery.

This would increase the penalty for conviction, making the defendant eligible for the death penalty.

The prosecution said that bloody footprints found at the crime scene were a size 10½, the same as that worn by Flowers.

The fourth (2007) and fifth (2008) ended in hung juries.

On June 18, 2010, a majority-white jury in Flowers' sixth trial convicted him of the 1996 murders and voted to impose a death sentence.

The sixth (2010) resulted in a conviction, and an appeal failed.

Flowers' case was one of three that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2016 were to be remanded to lower courts to be reviewed for evidence of racial bias in jury selection.

After the Mississippi Supreme Court reaffirmed the conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court again reviewed Flowers' case.

In 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court referred the sixth trial back to the Mississippi Supreme Court for review of racial discrimination in jury selection.

The following year the state court confirmed the original decision.

The Flowers case served as the subject of a 2018 podcast, In the Dark, on American Public Media.

In early 2021, Flowers was awarded $500,000—the maximum allowed under Mississippi law providing compensation for wrongful incarceration.

Under the agreed order, Mississippi was ordered to pay Flowers $50,000 per year for the next 10 years.

It overturned, on a 7–2 vote, the murder convictions in June 2019 in the decision Flowers v. Mississippi, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing for the majority.

In December 2019, Flowers was released from prison for the first time since his original arrest, on $250,000 bond, pending a state decision on whether it would attempt another prosecution.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Flowers' conviction in 2019 because of Evans' efforts to keep black people off the jury.

Flowers was released on bail to await the state's next decision.

Evans recused himself from the case and handed the case to the State Attorney General.

On September 4, 2020, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a Republican who had taken over the case from District Attorney Evans, announced she would not seek a seventh trial and had dropped the charges against Flowers.

In 2020, it was announced that charges would be dropped against Flowers.