Breaking News: Curtis Flowers was tried 6 times for the same crime. Now the Supreme Court will hear his case. - News Paper

Season two of the In the Dark podcast profiled the death row inmate this summer. In a new development, he stands to have his latest conviction overturned.

Even by true crime standards, the case at the center of In the Dark season two is extraordinary.

The acclaimed podcast probes the layers of longstanding criminal justice cases. This past summer, it devoted its second season to Curtis Flowers, a black man from Mississippi who has been tried six times — yes, six — for the 1996 murders of four small-town furniture store employees. Flowers is the only man in US history to stand trial six times for the same crime.

But now, as of an order issued Friday, Flowers will go before the Supreme Court — which could decide whether his guilty verdict will be overturned or upheld once and for all.

Despite a lack of evidence connecting him to the murders, and a case which legal advocates have argued was “built on faulty eyewitnesses, improper forensics, and false confessions from untruthful informants,” Curtis was found guilty three times in succession after each subsequent guilty conviction was overturned on appeal by higher courts. Then two more trials ended in hung juries, with the jury divided along racial lines.

Flowers’s most recent retrial, in 2010, resulted in a verdict reached after only half an hour of juror deliberation. The jury, which contained only one black juror, voted in favor of the death penalty.

Prosecutor Doug Evans — who has tried all six of the cases, and who once delivered the keynote address at a meeting of white supremacist segregationists — sought the death penalty in all but one of the retrials. Flowers was first sentenced to death for the murders in 1999, and he has remained on death row ever since.

Flowers’s current appeal revolves around racism in jury selection. And its outcome could have serious ramifications — not only for Flowers himself, but for the racial makeup of juries around the country.

Flowers’s appeal revolves around a troubling, but commonplace, aspect of jury selection

After Flowers’s first two convictions (which were both appealed), higher courts found evidence of prosecutorial misconduct as well as racial discrimination during the juror selection process.

Flowers’s lawyers argue that prosecutor Evans has a lengthy history of “adjudicated purposeful race discrimination” in selecting jurors for the cases he tries. Specifically, Evans has frequently relied on the peremptory challenge, which allows attorneys to ask for the removal of a limited number of jurors without needing to give a reason.

If you’re thinking that sounds like it opens the door for potential misuse and abuse, you’re right. The peremptory challenge has long been controversial because it may tacitly systematize racial discrimination; Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall favored its complete abolition.

And a 1986 Supreme Court case, Batson v. Kentucky, established that peremptory challenge cannot be used to discriminate against jurors based on race, ethnicity, or sex. But that’s not always a guarantee of fairness.

In fact, in each of Flowers’s first four trials, Evans used all of his juror “strikes,” including his peremptory challenges, with the apparent intent to remove as many black jurors from the jury selection as he could.

Flowers’s appeal of his latest 2010 conviction rests on this aspect of the case, and his petition minces no words about how Evans used peremptory challenges to racially discriminate against him:

Through the first four trials, prosecutor Doug Evans relentlessly removed as many qualified African American jurors as he could. He struck all ten African Americans who came up for consideration during the first two trials, and he used all twenty-six of his allotted strikes against African Americans at the third and fourth trials.

Two previous courts found that Evans’s conduct violated Flowers’s right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. In fact, in 2007, the Mississippi state Supreme Court found that Evans’s behavior represented “as strong [a] case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge.”

Now, the current appeal, which has reached the US Supreme Court, is arguing that the Mississippi state Supreme Court should have considered Evans’s established history of using peremptory challenges to violate Flowers’s rights when it upheld Flowers’s 2010 conviction. It points out that Batson v. Kentucky explicitly orders courts to consider established patterns of discrimination by attorneys when they decide the merits of peremptory challenges.

Without taking this context into account, Flowers’s lawyers argue, the “unintended message” the courts are sending to attorneys when they use peremptory challenges to discriminate is, “Just be careful to cover your tracks.”

The rule that peremptory challenges can’t be used to discriminate is well-established in judicial procedure. New Supreme Court appointee Brett Kavanaugh even wrote about the issue when he was a Yale law student; at the time, he argued that the defense team in a case should always be allowed to hear and rebut a prosecutor’s peremptory challenges in order to prevent discrimination. In 2016, the Supreme Court issued a nearly unanimous decision upholding the Batson v. Kentucky precedent.

The current Supreme Court agreed to hear oral arguments in Flowers’s case in an order issued on Friday. If the Court rules against Flowers’s appeal, it would mark a surprising shift in the way courts are allowed to view peremptory challenges, which could in turn substantially alter the way peremptory challenges work during criminal proceedings. Such a shift would most likely work against the defendants who most need equal protection under the law.

However, if the Court finds in favor of Flowers, it has an opportunity to expand upon the previous rulings to strengthen the limits of the peremptory challenge and to compel lower courts to take an attorney’s pattern of discrimination more seriously when deciding how the challenge should be used.

If the Supreme Court rejects Flowers’s appeal, his conviction will be upheld. If it finds in favor of his appeal, his conviction will most likely be overturned, at which point Flowers — who had no criminal record at the time of his initial arrest — could potentially face an unheard-of seventh trial.

In the Dark’s deep-dive reporting may have actually assisted Flowers’s defense

In the Dark’s second season, which aired in the summer of 2018, has been critically acclaimed for its close-up look at the many racialized abuses of power occurring throughout Flowers’s numerous trials and retrials. The podcast’s team of journalists, who lived and worked in Mississippi for a year while reporting the case, deeply researched the question of whether, and how extensively, the prosecution had racially discriminated against Flowers when selecting jurors.

They found that not only had Evans and his staff discriminated against Flowers, but also that Evans’s office had a long history of racial discrimination against black jurors. In surveying more than 418 trials dating back to 1992, they found that Evans and his assistants removed black jurors from juries at a rate 4.5 times higher than white jurors. The podcast’s reporting was included in Flowers’s Supreme Court appeal as well as in an amicus brief filed on behalf of the defense.

Madeleine Baran, In the Dark’s host and lead investigator, told Vox that the podcast has helped shed light on a rarely examined aspect of criminal justice.

“Our reporting also called attention to how little we know about the race of people struck from juries in this country,” she said in an email. “This issue is critical to understanding how race and racism impacts our criminal justice system, and yet, outside of a few limited studies, no one tracks it.”

In the Dark is notably dedicated to this sort of close investigative look at the justice system. Its first season, released in 2016, investigated the 1989 murder of Jacob Wetterling. While the podcast was still in production, Wetterling’s killer, long a primary suspect in the case, confessed to the crime, thereby transforming a series that might have been otherwise received as a murder mystery into a deeper look at the many factors that contributed to such long-delayed justice.

The series’ ensuing investigative focus has made it a standout among longform true crime series — and the fact that its longstanding cases continue to yield current developments has only aided in its success.

On Friday, following the Supreme Court announcement that it would hear the case, In the Dark released an update episode discussing the order and what it could mean for Flowers’s future.

Speaking to Vox, Baran assured fans of the podcast that their reporting on the Flowers case isn’t done.

“We’ll be releasing [further] update episodes to help listeners understand what’s happening and to inform people of any major developments,” she said, adding, “The case of Curtis Flowers — and the story of what happens next, both for him and the district attorney who has pursued him relentlessly in six trials over 21 years — is not over. Neither is our reporting. We’ll continue to cover the case wherever it leads.”

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Breaking News: Curtis Flowers was tried 6 times for the same crime. Now the Supreme Court will hear his case. - News Paper