BREAKING: Supreme Court overturns Mississippi murder conviction on racial bias grounds [View all]

[StarfishSaver]

ON EDIT: I stepped all over the lede! Kavanaugh wrote the opinion! Thomas, not surprisingly, dissented.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned a 2010 conviction in the case of Curtis Flowers, a black man on death row in Mississippi for the 1996 murder of four people in a furniture store.

The high court sided with Curtis’ lawyers, who argued that District Attorney Doug Evans, who is white, excluded potential black jurors on the basis of race in the 2010 trial. The defense attorneys said the Mississippi Supreme Court failed to properly apply U.S. Supreme Court precedent in determining whether people were unconstitutionally kept off a jury on the basis of race.

Evans has attempted to convict Flowers six times over the years: in 1997, 1999, 2004, 2007, 2008 and 2010. Two trials — the only ones with more than one black juror — resulted in hung juries. The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the three earlier convictions on the basis of prosecutorial misconduct, including that Evans improperly excluded potential black jurors.

But the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the 2010 conviction, and Flowers was sentenced to death. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Flowers v. Mississippi, with both conservative and liberal justices pointing to the “troubling” nature of the case
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Flowers, who had no criminal record, was charged with the killings in part because he had briefly worked at the store and was fired several days before. He has been behind bars for more than 20 years now. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/supreme-court-curtis-flowers-murder-conviction-overturned_n_5cf84665e4b0e63eda953bb1

Opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-9572_k536.pdf