Supreme Court throws out death sentence of Mississippi inmate
The Supreme Court has ruled 7-2 for a Mississippi inmate who alleged that racial discrimination in juror selection biased his murder trials, tossing out his death sentence.
Curtis Flowers, who is currently on death row in Mississippi, claimed that prosecutor Doug Evans repeatedly blocked black individuals from being on the jury for his trials for the murder of four people in a furniture store.
Flowers, who is African American, claimed that Evans stopped every potential black juror from sitting on the panels during his first four trials. Flowers’ fifth trial ended in a mistrial; but the inmate alleges that during a sixth trial, Evans allowed the first qualified black individual to sit on the jury before blocking the rest.
While prosecutors can stop, or strike, a certain number of people from sitting on juries for undisclosed reasons, the Supreme Court has previously ruled that those strikes can’t be used to turn down jurors on the basis of race.
Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Chief Justice Roberts ruled for Flowers. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented.
Flowers’s case gained media attention after it was the subject of the investigative podcast “In the Dark,” by American Public Media.
The oral arguments in the case also made national headlines for different reasons, as Thomas spoke for just the second time in a decade during the arguments.
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/449701-supreme-court-throws-out-death-sentence-of-mississippi-inmate