The Supreme Court has granted cert in Flowers v. Mississippi. The specific issue to be briefed by the parties is
did the Mississippi Supreme Court properly apply Batson v. Kentucky?
This case, which has already been to the Supreme Court once before, was recently featured in the podcast In the Dark.
Here is the write up in SCOTUSBlog
In Flowers v. Mississippi, the justices will once again review the case of Curtis Flowers, who was sentenced to death for an infamous quadruple murder at a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. Flowers was tried six times. During the first four trials, prosecutor Doug Evans was twice found to have violated the constitutional ban on racial discrimination in selecting jurors: He had struck all 10 of the potential African-American jurors, while he used all of his strikes to remove African Americans from the jury pool in the third and fourth trials. Flowers’ fifth trial deadlocked, but at his sixth trial, Evans allowed the first African-American juror to be seated but then struck the remaining five African-American jurors.
The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected Flowers’ challenge to Evans’ jury selection, but the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state supreme court to reconsider that ruling in light of the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Foster v. Chatman, in which the court held that the defendant in a capital case had shown intentional discrimination in the selection of jurors. When the case went back to the Mississippi Supreme Court, that court again upheld the ruling for the state, reasoning that Evans’ past discrimination did not affect its analysis. Flowers then returned to the justices, asking them to weigh in on whether the Mississippi Supreme Court was correct.
Here is a local article about the case.
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