Curtis Flowers, black man whose death sentence was tossed out by SCOTUS, dies at the age of 56

Curtis Flowers, a black man who was wrongfully tried for the same murders six times before the Supreme Court threw out his conviction and death sentence, died this week at the age of 56-years-old.Flowers’ family confirmed that he died Wednesday at his home in Winona, Mississippi, attorney Rob McDuff told CBS News on Thursday and no cause of death has been given.
The former inmate sat on death row for 22 years and was given the death penalty for the 1996 killings of four people at his former job, despite there never being any DNA evidence linking him to the crime and the murder weapon was never found.
Prosecutors tried to argue that Flowers was a disgruntled former employee who sought revenge against the store’s owner because she fired him and withheld most of his pay to cover the cost of merchandise he damaged. 
Flowers was first convicted by an all-white jury in 1997, but the conviction was overturned. He was later tried five more times for the same crime by the same prosecutor. He had three more convictions overturned on appeal and two mistrials.
During the final trial, there were 11 white jurors and one black juror who weighed the case after District Attorney Doug Evans struck five black prospective jurors.
Flowers was finally released in 2019 after the Supreme Court ruled that Evans and the state of Mississippi had violated Flowers’ constitutional rights and overturned his conviction. Mississippi dropped the charges in 2020.
Flowers’ legal team said in a statement Thursday that each of them felt “privileged to have called him a client,” according to the Associated Press.
“Later, in the years after his release and exoneration, we felt equally honored to call him a friend,” the legal team said. “No matter where he was — on death row, at home on his parents’ porch with his feet up, singing in church, or fishing in a local pond — Curtis shared his light.”
Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.

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