Curtis Flowers, Mississippi man wrongly convicted after being tried six times for the same murders, dies at 56

Curtis Flowers, a black man from Mississippi who was wrongly convicted multiple times while he was tried six times for the same crime by the same prosecutor, died. He was 56 years old.

Flowers’ family confirmed that he died Wednesday at his home in Winona, Mississippi, attorney Rob McDuff told CBS News on Thursday.

No cause of death was given, said McDuff, who was part of Flowers’ legal team. CBS News has contacted the coroner.

Flowers’ fight against the justice system began in Winona, Mississippi, on a July morning in 1996, when the owner of Tardy Furniture, an accountant, a deliveryman and a 16-year-old were shot in the head execution-style.

Flowers worked briefly at the furniture store that summer, but was fired after he stopped showing up after just three days. Police questioned him after the murders, but did not arrest him at the time. Flowers later moved to Texas to live with his sister, and he was arrested there in January 1997. He had no criminal history.

McDuff previously called Flowers’ case “unprecedented in the history of the American legal system.”

He said “60 Minutes” in 2021 that the first three convictions against Flowers were overturned “because of the prosecutor’s mispresentation of evidence to the jury and because of his discrimination in jury selection.”

The murder weapon was never found and there was no DNA or fingerprints linking Flowers to the crime.

At the first trial, an all-white jury found him guilty after only an hour of deliberation. Flowers, then 27, was sentenced to death.

His conviction was appealed and overturned. But he was tried five more times for the same crime by the same prosecutor. He saw three other convictions overturned on appeal, in addition to two mistrials.

The prosecutor was District Attorney Doug Evans, who in 2010 finally won a conviction to participate in the sixth trial, and Flowers returned to death row.

Then, journalists from American Public Media’s “In the Dark” podcast looked into the matter. Their investigation led witnesses, including one who said Flowers had confessed, to recant their statements.

“In the Dark” reporters and producers also analyzed decades of court data that revealed Evans had a pattern of excluding black people from juries at a disproportionate rate. In all of Flowers’ trials, 61 of the 72 jurors were white. All 61 people voted for conviction.

In 2019, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Evans and the State of Mississippi had violated Flowers’ constitutional rights and once again overturned his conviction. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that there had been a “relentless and determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals.” Six months later, Flowers was released on bail, leaving prison for the first time in 23 years.

“And I tell you, I felt like I was floating. I was just ready to go,” Flowers told CBS News in 2021.