A Mississippi death row inmate who was freed after more than two decades is suing the district attorney who prosecuted him six different times until he finally got a conviction for the murders of four people.
In a lawsuit filed Friday, Curtis Flowers says that Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans pressured 'witnesses to fabricate claims about seeing Mr. Flowers in particular locations on the day of the murders' and ignored other possible suspects.
Flowers was released in December 2019 after the US Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 to out the conviction and death sentence from his sixth trial, which took place in 2010.
'The State's relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury,' Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion in June of that year.
Curtis Flowers walks out of jail in Louisville, Mississippi in December 2019, six months after the US Supreme Court tossed out his latest conviction in a 1996 murder case due to racial bias
The court found that Montgomery County DA Doug Evans engaged in a 'relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals' in six different trials for the same incident
Four people were shot on July 16, 1996 in the Tardy Furniture store in the small town of Winona, Mississippi.
District Attorney Evans secured four convictions against Flowers: two for individual slayings and two for all four killings. They were all eventually overturned, and two other trials involving all four deaths ended in mistrials.
The case was made famous by the American Public Media podcast In the Dark, which found that Evans struck black potential jurors at 4.4 times the rate he struck white potential jurors over the course of 15 years, according to Mississippi Today.
The podcast recorded jailhouse informant Odell Hallmon in 2017 and 2018 recanting his testimony that Flowers had confessed to him.
Doug Evans, center, prosecuted Flowers six times and scored four convictions, which were all overturned. The Mississippi Attorney General says Flowers won't be tried a seventh time
Evans last tried Flowers in 2010, above. A judge has ordered Mississippi to pay Flowers 500K
Hallmon's story of the confession had been key evidence in later trials, but he told the podcast on a contraband cellphone from behind bars that his story was 'a bunch of fantasies, a bunch of lying.'
Flowers's lawsuit also names three of Evans's investigators.
The victims of the 1996 shooting were store owner Bertha Tardy, 59, and three employees: 45-year-old Carmen Rigby, 42-year-old Robert Golden and 16-year-old Derrick 'Bobo' Stewart. Tardy, Rigby and Golden died at the scene, and Stewart died about a week later.
Relatives of some of the victims have maintained their belief that Flowers is the killer, but attorneys for Flowers say he is innocent.
Clockwise: Owner Bertha Tardy, 59, and employees Carmen Rigby, 45, Robert Golden, 42, and Derrick 'Bobo' Stewart, 16, were shot at the Tardy Furniture store in Winona, Mississippi in 1996
The furniture store was in a town of 4,300 people, where 54 percent of residents are black
The lawsuit does not say how much money Flowers is seeking, leaving that decision to a jury.
'Curtis Flowers never should have been charged,' one of his attorneys, Rob McDuff of the Mississippi Center for Justice, said in a news release Friday.
McDuff said the killings 'were clearly the work of professional criminals' and Flowers, who was 26 at the time, had no criminal record.
'The prosecution was tainted throughout by racial discrimination and repeated misconduct,' McDuff said. 'This lawsuit seeks accountability for that misconduct.'
In March, a judge ordered the state of Mississippi to pay Flowers $500,000 for wrongful imprisonment - the maximum under a state law that allows up to $50,000 a a year for 10 years.
Flowers's case came to national prominence thanks to the In the Dark podcast
The payments did not preclude Flowers from suing the district attorney and investigators, his attorneys said.
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said in September 2020 that Flowers would not be tried a seventh time because prosecutors no longer had credible witnesses and evidence was too weak for another trial. Fitch took office in January 2020 and took control of the case after Evans stepped away from it.
The In the Dark podcast also presented an analysis finding a long history of racial bias in jury selection by Evans, and found evidence suggesting another man may have committed the crimes.
After the June 2019 Supreme Court ruling, Flowers was moved off death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman and taken to a regional jail.
He remained in custody because the original murder indictment was still active, and a judge released him on bail that December.
Winona, where the killings took place, sits near the crossroads of Interstate 55, the major north-south artery in Mississippi, and U.S. Highway 82, which runs east to west.
It's about half-hour drive from the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta. Among its 4,300 residents, about 54 percent are Black and 41 percent are white.
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