On June 7, Curtis Flowers will become the first death penalty defendant to be tried six times on the same evidence. His first two trials were overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. His third trial had its verdict vacated because of racial bias in jury selection. In the fourth trial, five jurors (all Black) voted to acquit, while seven (all white) voted to convict. A fifth trial resulted in a hung jury.
 Curtis Flowers |
With this background, and the fact that this case has taken place in Mississippi, it is more than logical to wonder both about Flowers’ guilt and the potential racial implications of his prosecution. The ongoing Troy Davis case, as well as the recently concluded Jena Six saga, are just two examples of many that should lead us to question the entire Curtis Flowers prosecution.
Flimsy evidence
Flowers is accused of committing a quadruple homicide in Winona, Mississippi on July 16, 1996. All four victims were killed in Tardy’s Furniture Store, where they worked. Three of the victims, including the store owner, were white, and one was Black.
The police found no fingerprint or DNA evidence linking Flowers to the crime, and a gun was never recovered. The primary evidence in the case is a bloody shoeprint for a size 10-11 basketball shoe.
Seven and nine months after the crime, two witnesses came forward, involuntarily, to say they witnessed Flowers in the area of the crime. This followed a campaign by the police advertising a $30,000 reward. On top of that, while police conducted 105 interviews, they videotaped only two of them.
The only tangible evidence against Flowers is a single micron of gunpowder residue on his right hand, and a shoe box matching the type of shoeprint found at the crime scene found in his girlfriend’s drawer—without the shoes. The prosecutors claim that the motive for the crime was the supposed anger of Flowers at being fired from Tardy’s and charged $82 for damaged merchandise during his employment.
The witness testimony in the first two trials was murky at best. Patricia Ann Hallmon, whose testimony helped established a timeline for prosecutors, was one of the main prosecution witnesses. Her brother, Odell Hallmon, wrote a letter to Flowers’ mother and defense attourney, claiming he persuaded his sister to testify so the two of them could split the reward money.
Then, after getting out of prison, he switched his story saying Flowers had coerced him into writing the letter, by promising him free cigarettes. Odell Hallmon weighs 300 pounds, and Flowers has never had a disciplinary write-up in prison. While none of this is conclusive, it makes the entire Hallmon testimony suspect.
Further, Katherine Snow testified that she had seen Flowers around his uncle’s car, from where the alleged murder weapon was said to be stolen. She told police in three separate interviews that the person she saw was a complete stranger. She also admitted that she would recognize Flowers without being shown a photo. It was not until a month and a half after she was first interviewed that she made the claim the man she saw was Curtis Flowers.
Inconsistencies abounded when in the second trial one of the original witnesses, who had testified that Flowers had confessed to him in jail, also recanted his testimony, saying he had been coerced by the prosecution. As mentioned above, while Flowers was convicted in the first two trials, the Mississippi State Supreme Court set aside both verdicts for what they termed prosecutorial misconduct.
Prosecutor will not give up
Despite the murky situation surrounding the case, prosecutor Doug Evans refused to be denied a conviction, and proceeded to a third trial. In this trial, he used every one of his challenges to strike Blacks from the jury. The State Supreme Court ruled that his actions constituted racial bias and again vacated the conviction.
Refusing to back down, Evans tried the case a fourth time, which resulted in a mistrial when the jury split along racial lines. In the fifth trial, one lone Black juror held out, resulting in another hung jury. This juror was then charged with perjury, a charge that could not be sustained and was dropped.
With evidence that could be called circumstantial at best, and quite a bit of seemingly compromised testimony, Evans has been unable to convict Flowers. He was, however, helped along by conservative legislators who introduced a bill into both houses of the Mississippi legislature that would allow a court to select a jury from a multi-county district. This would have the effect of making it easy for prosecutors to choose a jury most likely to return a conviction. While this bill passed the Senate, it is still pending in the lower house.
Particularly revealing is that the legislators who originally sponsored this legislation are supporters of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor of Mississippi’s notorious White Citizens Councils, which were a bastion of pro-segregationist thought and whose politics have not changed much since.
The Curtis Flowers case shows clearly that the death penalty above all else is a political tool used by politicians to support their “law and order” agendas, more often than not by utilizing racial stereotypes. It is not surprising that groups like the CofCC would spearhead the campaign against Curtis Flowers. The death penalty is an integral part of their agenda, which promotes bigotry against immigrants, racist stereotypes and pro-business demagogy.
It is an agenda that has kept working people in the South divided, promotes anti-union activity to keep wages low, and pushes people to embrace bigotry to explain impoverished conditions. The only sectors of society that benefit are the companies who reap the profits of division and the politicians who can use that same division to advance their own careers.
The case of Curtis Flowers is an outrage. He has been held in jail through five trials since 1997 in a case where the prosecution cannot prove guilt without resorting to bias, intimidation and manipulation. We are joining in the call by the Friends of Justice organization for those concerned with this outrage to assemble at the courthouse in Winona on June 7, the start of the unprecedented sixth trial. Friends of Justice is also accepting donations to get people to Winona and continue promoting the case. More on Friends of Justice and the case can be found on the group’s website: http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/curtis-flowers/
Justice for Curtis Flowers!
