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Thread: Curtis Giovanni Flowers - Mississippi

  1. #11
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    State denies petition in appeal of Curtis Flowers

    The Mississippi Supreme Court has once again turned away a petition for appeal filed by Curtis Flowers. Flowers, who turns 46 on Sunday, had asked the Montgomery County Circuit Court for discovery, including prosecutors notes about jury selection at his trial. When the judge denied the request because there was no evidence of racial-bias, he appealed.

    http://www.wtva.com/news/State_denie...s_Flowers.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  2. #12
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    US Supreme Court orders Curtis Flowers Hearing

    The US Supreme Court orders Mississippi to re-examine Curtis Flowers death penalty conviction for evidence of racial prejudice in jury selection.

    Curtis Flowers has been on death row in the 1996 killing of Winona furniture store owner Bertha Tardy and 3 of her employees. The US Supreme Court threw out today the Mississippi high court's 2014 decision affirming Flowers conviction and death sentence and told the court to look again at Flowers' claim that African American jurors were excluded from his last trial in 2010 for racial reasons.

    The decision didn't throw out Flowers conviction and death sentence but ordered the State Supreme Court to re-examine whether African American jurors were purposely excluded from serving on Flowers trial which could win Flowers a new trial.

    (Source: The Delta News)
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  3. #13
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Mississippi Supreme Court upholds death penalty

    JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - The Mississippi Supreme Court has again affirmed the death sentence for a man convicted of killing four people at a furniture store.

    Justices Thursday said they found no racial prejudice in the way jurors were chosen.

    Curtis Giovanni Flowers has been tried six times in the fatal shootings that happened in 1996 in Winona.

    He was convicted and sentenced to death in the first three trials, but those were overturned. Jurors couldn't agree on a verdict in the fourth and fifth trials.

    At the sixth trial, in 2010, Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death. The state Supreme Court upheld that conviction in 2014.

    The U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 told state justices to review whether there was discrimination in how some black people were excluded as potential jurors.

    http://www.wtok.com/content/news/Mis...3.html?ref=573

    6 Trials for this guy that's an outrage.

  4. #14
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    State Supreme Court will not reconsider appeals of two death row inmates

    By Maggie Wade
    WLOX

    JACKSON, MS (Mississippi News Now) - The State Supreme Court is refusing to reconsider appeals by two inmates on death row.

    Forty-seven-year-old Curtis Giovanni Flowers was convicted in 1996 for shooting four people to death at a Winona furniture store. He was convicted and sentenced to death in three trials, but those were overturned. Jurors couldn't agree on a verdict in the fourth and fifth trials.

    In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court told state justices to review the case. The state court ruled against Flowers in November 2017 and Thursday reaffirmed that ruling.

    The court is also refusing to reconsider the appeal of 32-year-old Terry Pitchford. He was convicted of capital murder in 2006 in Grenada and sentenced to death. Pitchford argues he never had a pre-trial competency hearing and only got one 9 years after his conviction.

    http://www.wlox.com/story/37573066/s...th-row-inmates
    Last edited by Moh; 02-24-2018 at 06:58 AM. Reason: Capitalization, spacing, left first letter off of "Jackson"--usual dog's dinner.
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
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  5. #15
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Career criminal provides key testimony in Curtis Flowers death penalty trial

    The Jackson Clarion-Ledger

    No witness has been more important to the prosecution's case against Curtis Flowers than Odell Hallmon. He’s testified that while the two men were in prison together, Flowers confessed to murdering four people at the Tardy Furniture store in Winona in 1996. That supposed confession helped convict Flowers in his sixth trial, in 2010, and send him to death row. But Flowers has denied he said any such thing to Hallmon.

    Hallmon has an astonishingly long criminal history that includes repeated charges for drug dealing, aggravated assault and robbery. So how reliable is his testimony and did he receive anything in exchange for it?

    For the second season of “In the Dark,” an investigative podcast from APM Reports, a team of journalists spent a year in Mississippi digging into the Flowers case and found that it’s supported by questionable evidence. In this episode, we investigate the veracity of the prosecution's star witness.

    Every Wednesday through the end of June, the Clarion Ledger will offer short summaries of every podcast episode.

    https://eu.clarionledger.com/story/n...ion/635249002/
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
    1 A Prayer of David. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!

  6. #16
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Recanted testimony, subjective science helps put Curtis Flowers on death row

    By Dave Mann
    The Jackson Clarion-Ledger

    This story is the second in a five-part series, produced in collaboration with APM Reports, examining the case of Curtis Flowers. This series is adapted from “In the Dark,” an investigative podcast produced by APM Reports.

    In March 1997, a Mississippi man named Frederick Veal was arrested for stealing his sister’s car near Greenwood. He was booked into the Leflore County jail and was put in a cell with the man who’d just been arrested for committing perhaps the worst crime the area had seen in years. His name was Curtis Flowers.

    Flowers had allegedly murdered four people at the Tardy Furniture store in nearby Winona in July 1996. After a few days in the cell, Veal told authorities that during a late-night conversation, Flowers had admitted to committing the murders. Another inmate in that cell would also soon claim that Flowers had confessed to him. They testified at Flowers’ murder trial, 10 months later, providing key evidence that helped convince jurors that Flowers was guilty and should be sentenced to death.

    But both jailhouse informants have recanted. Veal now says that investigators concocted the confession, according to a recent interview and a 2015 sworn affidavit that hasn’t been previously reported.

    Additionally, APM Reports has found that the key ballistics evidence in the Flowers case is based on a subjective and unscientific analysis, experts say.

    The revelations are part of a yearlong re-investigation of the Flowers case by a team of journalists from APM Reports that found serious flaws in the evidence. The investigation found that no direct evidence links Flowers to the crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to death.

    Veal and another informant named Maurice Hawkins testified at trial in Tupelo in 1997 that Flowers had confessed to them. Veal says he went along with the false confession because he wanted to free himself from jail. But he recanted his testimony, and Hawkins eventually did, too. Flowers' conviction would later be overturned on appeal repeatedly. Neither Veal nor Hawkins would testify in the five trials and re-trials that followed.

    Both men signed sworn affidavits, Hawkins in 2015 and Veal in 2016, saying their testimony against Flowers had been lies. Veal said he was placed in the cell for the purpose of extracting a confession from Flowers, according to court records.

    Veal said he told Sheriff Ricky Banks that he couldn’t get a confession, that Flowers kept to himself. Veal said his claim that Flowers confessed was constructed for him by District Attorney Doug Evans and Banks, according to his affidavit and court records.

    "I didn't have nothing. That's when they started putting all this stuff together to try to get this man convicted," Veal, now living in Atlanta, said during a recent interview. "They came down and gave me a piece of paper telling me what happened in the case.”

    Banks is still sheriff in Leflore County. He denied meeting with Veal about the Flowers confession. "I didn't meet with the D.A. and anybody else to discuss the statement that you're talking about,” Banks said. “I haven't made up a story about anything. I wouldn't be here if I made stories up, and I've been here since 1972."

    Evans would not comment in detail about the Flowers case.

    The use of jailhouse informants is a common, yet an often flawed, practice in criminal cases, experts say. Inmates who know how to work the criminal justice system often lie in exchange for leniency in their own cases.

    Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, said that in cases backed by strong evidence, prosecutors often don’t need or even want a jailhouse informant.

    “But we see time and time again, in a weak case, in a case where it's difficult to prove guilt, that jailhouse informants fill in the gap,” Natapoff said. “The prosecutor has a constitutional obligation not to use a witness who they know is committing perjury.”

    The missing gun

    Testimony from jailhouse informants isn’t the only questionable evidence that has put Flowers on death row. Ballistics evidence also was critical. An expert witness claimed the bullets found at the murder scene matched a gun owned by one of Flowers’ relatives.

    The murder weapon, a .380-caliber pistol, has never been found. But on the morning of the Tardy Furniture murders, Flowers’ uncle, Doyle Simpson, claimed that his .380 had been stolen from his car in a parking lot outside the garment factory where he worked.

    Simpson was an early suspect in the case, according to police records, but he ended up testifying for the prosecution in all six of Flowers’ trials. Prosecutors allege Flowers walked to the garment factory that morning and stole the gun from Simpson’s car.

    APM Reports has previously reported on flaws in the testimony offered by witnesses who said they saw Flowers walking near the garment factory on the morning of the crime. Some have changed their stories on critical details, couldn’t remember when they’d seen Flowers, or, in some cases, hadn’t talked to investigators until eight or nine months after the killings.

    Without the murder weapon, how could investigators link Simpson’s gun to the crime? They eventually dug two bullets from a wooden post in the backyard of Simpson’s mother’s house, where he said he’d done target practice.

    Investigators hoped to compare those bullets, which they believed had been fired from Simpson’s gun, with bullets found at the crime scene. But analysts couldn’t conclusively say that the bullets matched.

    That’s when investigators had a revelation. Recalling a ricochet mark on a wall at the scene, they theorized that a bullet might be found in one of the store’s mattresses. They returned to the store and found in a mattress, according to investigators, a bullet in good condition. The Mississippi State Crime Lab matched the bullet to the ones found in the post.

    Prosecutors later brought in David Balash, a ballistics and explosives expert with decades of experience, to testify in the case. He also found that the bullets matched.

    There’s no clear evidence that Flowers was ever in possession of Simpson’s gun. The ballistics testimony, however, does at least link the crime with a gun that Flowers might have had access to. But, experts say, the ballistics evidence is subjective and scientifically unreliable.

    ‘A subjective science’

    Experts have long questioned the basic tenants of ballistics analysis. It’s based on the notion that each gun leaves unique marks on a bullet, an assumption that has never been fully proven, experts say. Ballistic matches are based on a visual inspection of the bullets and determining whether the markings on one bullet are sufficiently similar to markings on another.

    A landmark 2009 report on forensic evidence by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ballistics is "based on unarticulated standards."

    "Today this is still a largely subjective science," said Alicia Carriquiry, who directs the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence, an independent research group at Iowa State University. "What we're actually talking about is somebody looking at two bullets and determining if they look similar.”

    Balash stands by his conclusions in the Flowers case. "I am 100 percent certain that these bullets were fired from one gun," he said. But he also acknowledged that the analysis is subjective. "[Ballistics analysis] has never been called a science. It's always been called an art form using scientific materials and equipment, and it's always been an opinion."

    His opinion helped send Flowers to death row.

    But there was another witness who would prove even more critical to the case. He was another jailhouse informant, who came forward after Veal and Hawkins had recanted. And he had an incredible story to tell.

    https://eu.clarionledger.com/story/n...fic/641464002/
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
    1 A Prayer of David. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!

  7. #17
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Report: Mississippi DA struck black jurors at 4½ times greater rate

    By Jerry Mitchell
    The Jackson Clarion-Ledger

    During his time as district attorney, Doug Evans and his office have struck black potential jurors at more than four times the rate as white potential jurors, an analysis by APM Reports concluded.

    Between 1992 and 2017, Evans’ office handled 418 criminals trials. APM Reports obtained jury information on 225 of those trials.

    In those trials, prosecutors struck half of all black potential jurors, compared to 11 percent of white potential jurors.

    APM Reports concluded that “even when controlling for race-neutral factors raised during juror questioning, black jurors were still far more likely to be struck than white jurors who answered in the same way.”

    APM Reports said its analysis “does not prove the jurors were struck because they were black. Why not? Because of too many other factors, some unknown. It simply shows potential jurors who are black in the 5th Judicial District were struck at a rate 4½ times that of potential white jurors.”

    The Clarion Ledger could not reach Evans for comment.

    On the morning of July 16, 1996, someone walked into the Tardy Furniture store in Winona, murdered four employees execution-style and stole nearly $400.

    Eight months after the killings, police arrested Flowers in Texas. He had worked for the store and had no prior criminal record.

    Evans portrayed Flowers as a disgruntled employee who had been fired and now had revenge on his mind. A state police investigator testified that authorities found $235 hidden in Flowers’ headboard and that he wore a 10.5 shoe — the same size that matched a bloody footprint at the store.

    Authorities found no murder weapon. Instead, they pointed to his relative’s gun, which was reportedly stolen that day. According to authorities, Flowers tested positive for a particle of gunpowder residue on the back of his right hand.

    He was convicted and sentenced to death in three trials by all-white or nearly all-white juries.

    In each case, the state Supreme Court overturned the convictions and ordered new trials.

    Both the high court and the trial judge questioned Evans’ dismissals of black potential jurors. (In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors can’t strike potential jurors strictly because of race.)

    In the fourth trial, the jury deadlocked, splitting along racial lines. Seven white jurors voted to convict, and five black jurors voted to acquit.

    In the fifth trial, the jury deadlocked again, this time 11-1 in favor of guilt. The nine white jurors voted in favor of guilt, along with two black jurors.

    One black juror voted to acquit, concluding the prosecution failed to prove its case. He told fellow jurors that he was in the alley not long before the killings and didn’t see anything.

    The judge had the juror arrested, insisting he lied during jury questioning because he failed to say he had personal knowledge about the case.

    A grand jury indicted the juror for perjury, but the charges were dropped after it was discovered that none of the jurors was ever asked whether they had personal knowledge of the crime.

    In the sixth trial, there was one black juror; the rest were white. That jury convicted Flowers and sentenced him to death.

    In 2014, the state Supreme Court upheld that conviction.

    Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court told state justices to review whether there was discrimination in how some black potential jurors were excluded. In November, state justices said they found no discrimination.

    Earlier this year, Mississippi’s high court reaffirmed its decision, refusing to reconsider Flowers’ death sentence.

    Of the 72 jurors who have deliberated Flowers’ fate, 61 have been white. All have voted to convict him.

    Of the 11 black jurors, five have voted to convict, and six have voted to acquit.

    The podcast has raised questions about Flowers’ case. For instance, a key prosecution witness against Flowers, Odell Hallmon, now admits he lied.

    “As far as him telling me he killed some people, hell, naw, he ain't ever told me that. That was a lie,” he told APM Reports on a contraband cellphone from his prison cell. “It was all make believe. Everything was all make believe on my part. … All of it was just a fantasy, that's all. A bunch of fantasies. A bunch of lies.”

    He lied about the Flowers’ case to get out of trouble for drug dealing, he said. “Doug Evans say he would rather have a murderer in prison than a drug dealer. He'd rather see a murderer in prison than a drug dealer, right? This is what Doug said. I used them son of a bitches just like they used me.”

    The district attorney told APM Reports this is why a judge instructs a jury that “a jailhouse informant is not very reliable, because they can change their statements very easily, for any reason.”

    What Hallmon testified to in court was the truth, Evans said. In a meeting with the judge during the sixth trial, Evans said he made sure Hallmon was telling the truth by administering a lie detector test, according to court records.

    Lie detector tests are not admissible in court because of their unreliability.

    After testifying against Flowers in the sixth trial, Hallmon killed three people and injured a fourth. He is now serving three life sentences for the slayings, plus 20 years for the assault and another 10 years for possessing a gun as a felon.

    Every Wednesday through the end of June, the Clarion Ledger will offer short summaries of every podcast episode. Click here to find the episodes.

    The news organization produces the “In the Dark” podcast, which this season is focusing on Curtis Flowers, whom Evans has prosecuted six times for murder. Flowers is now on Mississippi’s death row.

    https://eu.clarionledger.com/story/n...ors/692156002/
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
    1 A Prayer of David. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!

  8. #18
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Curtis Flowers podcast: DA spent decades prosecuting case

    APM Reports
    The Jackson Clarion-Ledger

    After examining every aspect of the Curtis Flowers capital murder case, reporters for APM Reports were nearly ready to present what they’d found to District Attorney Doug Evans.

    For the second season of “In the Dark,” an investigative podcast from APM Reports, a team of journalists spent a year digging into the Flowers case and found that it’s supported by no direct evidence. Flowers has been tried six times for the 1996 murders of four people at the Tardy Furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. He remains on death row.

    For the eighth episode, reporters researched Evans’ past: his high school years during school desegregation in Grenada, his tenure in law enforcement and his record as district attorney.

    Reporters also analyzed the composition of juries in hundreds of trials during Evans’ 26 years in office. The analysis found that Evans’ office was 4½ times more likely to strike black prospective jurors than white ones.

    Then, finally, the journalists met with the man who's spent more than two decades trying to have Flowers executed.

    https://eu.clarionledger.com/story/n...ase/697637002/
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
    1 A Prayer of David. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!

  9. #19
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Did jury makeup decide Curtis Flowers' fate and send him to death row?

    By Dave Mann
    The Jackson Clarion-Ledger

    This story is the fourth in a five-part series, produced in collaboration with APM Reports, examining the case of Curtis Flowers. This series is adapted from “In the Dark,” an investigative podcast by APM Reports.

    Ray Charles Carter knew he didn’t have a chance.

    It was June 18, 2010, and Carter was preparing to give his closing argument in defense of Curtis Flowers. It was the sixth time Flowers had stood trial for the 1996 murders of four people at the Tardy Furniture store in Winona. Three previous convictions had been overturned on appeal, and two other trials had ended in hung juries.

    Carter, a longtime Jackson attorney, had defended Flowers in three of those previous trials, and he believed that his client was innocent. But as he rose to give his closing remarks in the Montgomery County courthouse, not far from where the murders had happened, Carter looked at the faces of the 11 whites and one African American sitting on the jury and knew his case was a lost cause.

    “I could tell they were rejecting me, disapproving me,” he would later say. “I talked to them, and I scan as I talk. I could just read their faces, read the rejection, read the lack of affection. I mean you can feel when somebody seems to dislike you, has a distaste for you.”

    It took the jurors 29 minutes of deliberating to prove Carter right. They found Flowers, who is black, guilty and sentenced him to death.

    An APM Reports investigation of the Flowers case has found that the racial makeup of the juries was a powerful predictor of whether Flowers would be found guilty. The two times Flowers was judged by a jury with more than one African American, the juries deadlocked. In the four trials in which he faced an all-white jury or one with 11 whites, he was convicted.

    The analysis is among a number of revelations by APM Reports journalists investigating the 22-year-old case. Previous stories have reported that there’s no direct evidence against Flowers and no reliable evidence placing him near the scene or linking him to the murder weapon. Moreover, all three jailhouse informants who testified against Flowers have recanted, one directly to a reporter.

    n the six trials, District Attorney Doug Evans used the overwhelming majority of his strikes in jury selection against black potential jurors. Judges twice found that he’d intentionally struck black jurors because of their race, which is unconstitutional.

    Evans’ history of picking jurors also favored whites. As the Clarion Ledger recently reported, an APM Reports analysis of Evans’ 26-year tenure found that his office was 4 ½ times more likely to strike black potential jurors than white ones.

    Evans hasn’t responded to requests for comment about the jury analysis from either the Clarion Ledger or APM Reports. But he recently told the Greenwood Commonwealth, “I think these folks are just coming up with anything they can to discredit the case. … I’ve had many trials where no black jurors were struck.”

    Sixty-one of the 72 jurors in Flowers’ trials were white, and all 61 voted for guilt. Five of the 11 African Americans who have served on Flowers’ six juries have voted for guilt.

    In interviews with APM Reports, white jurors in the Flowers case said they were more likely to trust the prosecution and law enforcement. Several white jurors also said they were surprised that African Americans would testify against another African American. They found testimony by black prosecution witnesses especially convincing.

    “I wish I could remember what some black woman said on the stand, but I was really kind of surprised when she was on the stand and said that as far as she was concerned, he was guilty,” said Gay Evaldi, a white juror from the third trial. “But there were a lot of blacks that said what they saw, and it kind of helped tell you that he was guilty.”

    Jury selection happens in two stages. First, the judge removes from the jury pool anyone who clearly can’t evaluate the case fairly. Then prosecutors and defense attorneys take turns striking potential jurors. In capital trials in Mississippi, each side has 12 strikes. Attorneys can strike a juror for nearly any reason except that person’s race or gender.

    In Flowers’ second trial, in March 1999, Judge Clarence Morgan found that Evans had struck a black juror because of race. This is known as a Batson violation, named for the Supreme Court ruling that banned the use of race in jury selection. Morgan overruled Evans’ strike, and the man was the only African American seated on the jury.

    In the third trial, in February 2004, Evans used all his strikes against black potential jurors. The jury, of 11 whites and one African American, found Flowers guilty. But the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the conviction because it ruled that Evans had intentionally struck African Americans from the jury. The justices wrote that it was “as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge."

    The fourth trial featured a jury of seven whites and five African Americans, and in deliberations, it split along racial lines. The fifth trial had a jury of nine white and three African-American jurors, which also deadlocked.

    After two mistrials, Carter went into the sixth trial knowing the only direct evidence of Flowers’ guilt was the testimony of Odell Hallmon, a prison inmate who claimed Flowers confessed to the murders.

    Carter didn’t think Hallmon, who has a long criminal record dating to the late 1980s, was believable. (In fact, Hallmon recently recanted his testimony in an interview with APM Reports.)

    In the early stages of jury selection for that sixth trial, Evans and his assistant prosecutors accepted one African American. They then struck six people from the jury, five of them black. This resembled Evans’ history of picking juries. APM Reports analyzed the jury selection in 225 trials in which full data was available from 1992 through 2017. In that time, Evans’ office struck 50 percent of the eligible black jurors and 11 percent of white jurors.

    “I don’t know where that figure comes from,” Evans told the Greenwood Commonwealth. “I haven’t listened to (the podcast), and I don’t intend to because I know what this is about.”

    After he saw the panel with 11 white jurors on it — in a county that’s 45 percent black — Carter said he feared the sixth trial had already been decided. “After we picked the jurors, I was convinced that it was an uphill battle. And as time passed, I became more convinced that I didn’t have a chance.

    “All I ever wanted was for him to get a fair trial. Get a fair trial, and then I can accept whatever happened. But I can't accept not being given a fair trial.”

    https://eu.clarionledger.com/story/n...sis/726802002/
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
    1 A Prayer of David. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!

  10. #20
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    This Mississippi man has been tried 6 times for capital murder. He might be tried again.

    By Jerry Mitchell
    The Mississippi Clarion-Ledger

    Defense lawyers are seeking a hearing for death row inmate Curtis Flowers. Attorneys accuse authorities of failing to share evidence that could have pointed to at least two other suspects in the 1996 quadruple homicide in Winona.

    “Stunning new evidence has come to light which underscores the need to give (Flowers) a full and fair opportunity to litigate his post-conviction claims,” the motion says.

    “On June 26, counsel for (Flowers) learned that in 1996, the State interviewed, arrested, and held an alternative suspect in the Tardy murders, Willie James Hemphill.”

    On the morning of July 16, 1996, someone walked into the Tardy Furniture Store in Winona, killed four employees execution-style and stole nearly $400. Police found bloody footprints made by Fila Grant Hill shoes.

    Flowers convicted in first 3 trials. Each time, his conviction was reversed.

    APM Reports, the investigative and documentary reporting team based in St. Paul, Minnesota, spent a year digging into the Flowers case for its "In the Dark" podcast.

    The team tracked down Hemphill, who admitted he wore Fila Grant Hill shoes and lived across from the store. Hemphill, who spent 11 days in jail, said police also taped the interview and took notes.

    But defense lawyers never received a copy of that interview and never knew that Hemphill was a suspect.

    “In the 22-year history of this case, none of this evidence was ever disclosed to the defense,” the motion says. “The sole reference to Hemphill anywhere in the State’s files that were turned over to the defense is a single-page Miranda waiver that contains no information other than Hemphill’s name.”

    Prosecutors are required to share all evidence that tends to show a defendant’s innocence.

    Eight months after the killings, police arrested Flowers in Texas. He had worked for the store and had no prior criminal record.

    District Attorney Doug Evansportrayed Flowers as a disgruntled employee who had been fired and now had revenge on his mind. A state police investigator testified that authorities found $235 hidden in Flowers' headboard.

    Authorities found no weapon. Instead, they pointed to Flowers' relative's gun, which was reportedly stolen that day. According to authorities, Flowers tested positive for a particle of gunpowder residue on the back of his right hand.

    He was convicted and sentenced to death in three trials by all-white or nearly all-white juries.

    In each case, the state Supreme Court overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial.

    Both the high court and the trial judge questioned Evans' dismissals of black potential jurors. (In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors can't strike potential jurors strictly because of race.)

    Two juries deadlocked on verdicts. A sixth jury convicted Flowers.

    In the fourth trial, the jury deadlocked, splitting along racial lines. Seven white jurors voted to convict, and five black jurors voted to acquit.

    In the fifth trial, the jury deadlocked again, this time 11-1 in favor of guilt. The nine white jurors voted in favor of guilt, along with two black jurors.

    One black juror voted to acquit, concluding the prosecution failed to prove its case. He told fellow jurors that he was in the alley not long before the killings and didn't see anything.

    The judge had the juror arrested for lying during jury questioning because he failed to say he had personal knowledge about the case.

    A grand jury indicted the juror for perjury, but the charges were dropped after it was discovered that none of the jurors was ever asked whether he or she had personal knowledge of the crime.

    In the sixth trial, there was one black juror; the rest were white. That jury convicted Flowers and sentenced him to death.

    In 2014, the state Supreme Court upheld that conviction.

    Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court told state justices to review whether there was discrimination in how some black potential jurors were excluded. In November, state justices said they found no discrimination.

    Earlier this year, Mississippi's high court reaffirmed its decision, refusing to reconsider Flowers' death sentence.

    Witness admits he lied to convict Flowers of murder

    APM Reports has also raised questions about a key prosecution witness against Flowers, Odell Hallmon, who admitted he lied.

    "As far as him telling me he killed some people, hell, naw, he ain't ever told me that. That was a lie," he told APM Reports on a contraband cellphone from his prison cell. "It was all make-believe. Everything was all make-believe on my part ... All of it was just a fantasy, that's all. A bunch of fantasies. A bunch of lies."

    Evans told APM Reports this is why a judge instructs a jury that "a jailhouse informant is not very reliable, because they can change their statements very easily, for any reason."

    After testifying against Flowers in the sixth trial, Hallmon killed three people and injured a fourth. He is now serving three life sentences for the slayings, plus 20 years for the assault and 10 years for possessing a gun as a felon.

    https://www.clarionledger.com/story/...ial/752476002/
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
    1 A Prayer of David. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!

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