Court tosses black man's murder conviction over racial bias

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court today threw out the murder conviction and death sentence for a black man in Mississippi because of a prosecutor's efforts to keep African Americans off the jury.

The defendant already has been tried six times and now could face a seventh trial.

The removal of black prospective jurors deprived inmate Curtis Flowers of a fair trial, the court said in a 7-2 decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The long record of Flowers' trials stretching back more than 20 years shows District Attorney Doug Evans' "relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals," with the goal of an all-white jury, Kavanaugh wrote.

In Flowers' sixth trial, the jury was made up of 11 whites and one African American. Prosecutor Evans struck five black prospective jurors.

In the earlier trials, three convictions were tossed out, including one when the prosecutor improperly excluded African Americans from the jury. In the second trial, the judge chided Evans for striking a juror based on race. Two other trials ended when jurors couldn't reach unanimous verdicts.

"The numbers speak loudly," Justice Kavanaugh said in a summary of his opinion he read in the courtroom, noting that Evans had removed 41 of the 42 prospective black jurors over the six trials. "We cannot ignore that history."

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas called Kavanaugh's opinion "manifestly incorrect" and wrote that Flowers "presented no evidence whatsoever of purposeful race discrimination." Justice Neil Gorsuch joined most of Thomas' opinion.

Justice Thomas, the only African American on the court, said the decision may have one redeeming quality: "The state is perfectly free to convict Curtis Flowers again."

Flowers has been in jail more than 22 years, since his arrest after four people were found shot to death in a furniture store in Winona, Miss., in July 1996.