Curtis Flowers dies after Supreme Court reversal over jury selection bias
The Mississippi man died at 56 following a 2019 ruling that prosecutors unconstitutionally excluded Black jurors from his six trials.
By Pablo Harrison ·
Curtis Flowers, a 56-year-old Black man from Winona, Mississippi, died recently after spending nearly 23 years in prison. His death follows a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned his capital conviction due to racial bias in jury selection. The ruling marked the end of a legal battle that spanned six trials over two decades.
Flowers was convicted four times for the 1996 murder of four people at a furniture store where he had worked. District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted all six of Flowers' cases. During these proceedings, Evans used peremptory challenges to remove Black potential jurors, leaving juries with few or no Black members despite Black residents forming a majority in the county.
The legal conflict began with the 1880 Supreme Court case Strauder v. West Virginia. That decision established that the Fourteenth Amendment requires equal treatment of Black and white citizens regarding jury service. For nearly eight decades, courts upheld this ruling. However, prosecutors often circumvented it by using peremptory challenges to exclude Black jurors without providing a race-neutral reason.
The 1965 decision in Swain v. Alabama changed the legal standard. The Supreme Court held that a defendant had to prove a systematic pattern of racial exclusion across multiple cases to establish a constitutional violation. This created a difficult burden of proof for defendants. In 1985, the Court overruled Swain in Batson v. Kentucky. Batson allowed a defendant to establish a prima facie case of discrimination based on a prosecutor's strikes in a single trial, shifting the burden to the state to offer a neutral explanation.
Despite the Batson ruling, prosecutors continued to exclude minority jurors by citing race-neutral reasons. In Flowers' case, the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed his first three convictions due to prosecutorial misconduct. The fourth and fifth trials resulted in hung juries. Flowers was convicted in the sixth trial. The U.S. Supreme Court later found that the state had engaged in a relentless effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.
Statistics from the sixth trial revealed the disparity in prosecutorial conduct. The state asked the five Black prospective jurors who were struck a total of 145 questions. In contrast, the state asked the 11 seated white jurors only 12 questions. This amounted to an average of 29 questions per struck Black juror versus one question per seated white juror. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion for the 2019 reversal.
Flowers was released from death row in December 2019. His case is cited by legal experts as a symbol of the ongoing struggle against racial bias in the justice system. The death of Flowers closes a specific legal chapter but leaves the broader issue of jury selection practices unresolved in many jurisdictions.
The Supreme Court recently ruled on related issues of racial protection. On April 29, 2026, the Court issued a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais. This ruling weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting rules that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or language minority status. The decision limits the ability of state and federal agencies to enforce voting rights protections.
Source: amNY
