Curtis Flowers is a free man after serving nearly 23 years for a 1996 quadruple murder. He has filed a lawsuit against the district attorney who tried him six times.
Flowers walked free from prison in 2019 after the US Supreme Court overturned his conviction, the New York Post reported. His death sentence, which resulted from his sixth trial surrounding a shooting that took place at a furniture store and left four people dead, was also overturned.
“Curtis Flowers never should have been charged,” his attorney said in a statement Friday.
Flowers is now in the process of suing Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans, who happens to be white, and three other investigators after the Supreme Court cited an unconstitutional pattern of excluding black jurors in Flowers’ trials.
The lawsuit also accuses the prosecutors of pressuring witnesses “to fabricate claims about seeing Mr. Flowers in particular locations on the day of the murders” and also ignoring other suspects.
“The prosecution was tainted throughout by racial discrimination and repeated misconduct,” Rob McDuff of the Mississippi Center for Justice wrote. “This lawsuit seeks accountability for that misconduct.”
Flowers received a $500,000 payout from the state for wrongful imprisonment.
Attorney General Lynn Fitch will oversee the murder case. Last year, Fitch said the evidence against Flowers was too weak to put him on trial for the seventh time.
Double jeopardy was not an option in Flowers’ case because three convictions were thrown out on appeals due to mistakes made by the prosecution, and two ended in mistrials.
