If you listened to the second season of American Public Media’s In the Dark and are a thinking person with a functioning soul, you were undoubtedly appalled at the treatment of Curtis Flowers by the Mississippi legal system. It turns out, the U.S. Supreme Court agrees, announcing today that it is reversing Flowers’s murder conviction and throwing out his death sentence. Again.
Flowers, who is black, has been tried six times on murder charges, and each time prosecutors have worked to keep African Americans off the jury. (Twice, the jury was unable to reach a verdict.) In Flowers’s sixth trial, the one that the Supreme Court has now overturned, the jury was made up of 11 whites and one African American. District Attorney Doug Evans struck five black prospective jurors. The justices held 7-2 that the removal of black prospective jurors violated Flowers’s rights. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the court’s majority opinion, while Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch…
