Mississippi drops case against Curtis Flowers after he was tried 6 times on murder charges
Prosecutors in Mississippi are dismissing the case against Curtis Flowers, a Black man who was tried six times in a murder case by a White prosecutor and spent 23 years in prison, a spokeswoman for the state’s attorney general said Friday.
The indictments against Flowers over the deaths of four people were dismissed, Colby Jordan, a spokeswoman for the the Mississippi attorney general told CNN.
Flowers was accused of capital murder in the killing of four people inside a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. Prosecutors alleged Flowers stole a .380-caliber pistol and shot the store’s owner, Beth Tardy, and three employees execution-style on July 16, 1996.
Flowers had once worked for Tardy and, according to prosecutors, killed her because she fired him after docking his pay for damaging a pair of batteries. He killed the other three victims to eliminate witnesses, prosecutors alleged. Tardy and two victims were White; one was Black.
He was imprisoned for two decades and faced six murder trials. The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned Flowers’ first three convictions, two of which resulted in death sentences, and his next two trials ended in hung juries.
After his last trial in 2010, a Montgomery County jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to death.
His lawyers appealed the case and last year, the United States Supreme Court ruled Flowers deserved a new trial because state’s lead prosecutor, Doug Evans, had engaged in unconstitutional racial discrimination by striking African American jurors from the panel.
