Politics|Excluding Black Jurors in Curtis Flowers Case Violated Constitution, Supreme Court Rules
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WASHINGTON — A white Mississippi prosecutor violated the Constitution by excluding black jurors from the sixth trial of Curtis Flowers, a black man who was convicted of murdering four people in 1996 in a furniture store, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, said the prosecutor, Doug Evans, had run afoul of the court’s 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky. That ruling carved out an exception to the centuries-old rule that peremptory challenges during jury selection — ones that do not require giving a reason — are completely discretionary and cannot be second-guessed.
A potential juror’s race, the court ruled in 1986, cannot be the reason. Lawyers accused of racial discrimination in jury selection, the court said, must provide a nondiscriminatory explanation.
The Batson ruling is easily evaded, as it is not hard to offer reasons for striking jurors unrelated to race. Those reasons, the Supreme Court has said, do not have to be “persuasive, or even plausible.”
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On Friday, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Evans’s reasons. In the process, it put some teeth into the Batson decision and cleared the way for a seventh trial of Mr. Flowers should prosecutors wish to pursue one. Mr. Flowers is likely to remain in state custody in the meantime.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.
In Mr. Flowers’s first four trials, held between 1997 and 2007, Mr. Evans used all 36 of his peremptory challenges to strike black potential jurors. Three of those trials ended in convictions reversed on appeal, and one in a mistrial.
Official court records do not show the racial makeup of the jury pool for the fifth trial, in 2008, but the jury itself included nine white and three black people. It deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial.
Over the years, Mississippi courts have twice ruled that Mr. Evans had violated the Batson decision.
At the sixth trial, the one directly at issue in the Supreme Court case, Flowers v. Mississippi, No. 17-9572, Mr. Evans accepted the first black prospective juror and struck the next five. Mr. Evans questioned black prospective jurors closely, asking them an average of 29 questions each. He asked the 11 white jurors who were eventually seated an average of one question each.
The jury, made up of one black and 11 white jurors, convicted Mr. Flowers and sentenced him to death. This time, the Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence, accepting Mr. Evans’s explanations for his latest strikes.
Mr. Evans said he excluded black potential jurors because they knew witnesses or members of Mr. Flowers’s family, had been sued by the furniture store where the murders took place, had qualms about the death penalty or had turned up late for jury selection.
Mr. Flowers’s lawyers said that some of those reasons were false and others implausible or insufficient to warrant exclusion. They added that Mr. Evans did not strike white jurors with comparable connections to the case.
Mr. Flowers’s case was the subject of season-long examination by the podcast “In the Dark,” which raised substantial questions about his guilt. In February, the podcast won a George Polk award, a prestigious journalism prize, for its work about the case.
Justice Kavanaugh wrote an article in The Yale Law Journal calling for vigorous enforcement of the Batson decision when he was a law student.
