Doug Evans, the local district attorney, served as the lead prosecutor [against Flowers] at all six of the trials.
In Flowers' first two trials, which involved a single murder charge, Evans used his peremptory strikes to eliminate all 10 potential African-American jurors. Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death, but both convictions were later reversed by the Mississippi Supreme Court, which found that Evans had engaged in intentional misconduct, such as introducing evidence of the other murders.
At his third trial, Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of all four victims, as Howe wrote. But the Mississippi Supreme Court also overturned those convictions. Evans had used all 15 of his peremptory strikes to remove African-American members of the jury pool, the state court ruled, in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky.
When Flowers was tried a fourth time, Evans used 11 peremptory strikes to remove potential African-American jurors, resulting in a jury with seven whites and five African-Americans. That jury deadlocked, as did the jury in Flowers' fifth trial, Howe noted. Evans used five peremptory strikes in that trial, but there is no record of the race of the jurors whom he struck.
At Flowers' sixth trial, in 2010, six of the 26 potential jurors in the jury pool were African-American. Evans allowed the first one to be seated but then struck the next five prospective African-American jurors, resulting in a jury of 11 white jurors and just one African-American. Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death for all four murders.
That 2010 conviction was upheld by the Mississippi Supreme Court, and upheld again after it was remanded for reconsideration in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2016 decision in Foster v. Chatman, which held that the use of peremptory strikes to remove potential African-American jurors, as reflected in prosecutors' notes, was unconstitutional.
This most recent conviction is the one before the justices today, and they will consider whether the state high court erred in how it applied Batson.
