Saturday, June 12, 2010
Curtis Flowers
So much for double jeopardy. The provision in law that forbids an individual from being tried twice for the same crime has not applied to Curtis Flowers. The African-American man is now facing his sixth trial for allegedly killing four people at a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi, on July 16, 1996. The victims, the owner, two white employees and one black employee, were shot executive-style with bullets in the back of the head. Flowers, who had worked at the store for three days in July, was charged with the crime the following January. Prosecutors claimed that he was angry because money had been deducted from his paycheck for damaged merchandise.
The murder weapon was never recovered, and no fingerpring of DNA evidence was found linking Flowers to the crime. Flowers had no criminal record.
According to Truthout, the half dozen attempts by prosecutors to convict Flowers of the murders is a record for the American judicial system. He’s been held in jail since 1997, and gone to trial in 1997, 1999, 2004, 2007, 2008 and now 2010. His five previous trials ended either in hung juries or overturned convictions. The first two times, Flowers was found guilty, but his convictions were overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court.
At the 2008 trial, one of the three black jurors, a retired teacher named James Bibbs, refused to convict Flowers and was charged with perjury for failing to reveal that he had been near the scene of the crime on the day the murders took place, but the charges were later dropped.
On Thursday, a juror of eleven whites and one black were chosen for Flowers’ sixth trial even though the population of Montgomery County, Mississippi, is 50% African-American.
-David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff
Judge: No Jury Racial Claims in Man's Trial (by Elizabeth Crisp, Jackson Clarion-Ledger)
African-American Mississippi Man Starts Record Sixth Murder Trial (by Bill Quigley, Audrey Stewart and Davida Finger, Truthout)
Curtis Flowers (Friends of Justice)
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