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He looked lean and sleek and surprisingly put together.
Were it not for the shackles at his wrists and ankles, he might have been walking onto a yacht. I noticed, as he made coffee, that his knife rack was shaped like a human body, stuck through with blades at various points. There were only two possibilities. The money had been stolen,
or it had never existed. Subscribe at newyorker.com slash dark and you'll get access to all of it, plus a free New Yorker tote bag. I must say, the very best tote bag around. That's newyorker.com slash dark. At 8 o'clock this morning, our reporters Raymond Tungacar and Curtis Gilbert knocked on the door of Archie Flowers, Curtis Flowers' father. Hi. Good morning, Mr. Flowers. Hi, how are you? May we come in? Good morning.
They sat down on the couch. Raymond pulled out his phone. And together, they waited. So I am just going to pull up the Supreme Court website. That's right. Connected. They waited to see if today would be the day that a decision would come down from the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Curtis Flowers versus the state of Mississippi. What's going through your mind right now? Just prayed about it. I just said, you know, I hope...
And then... So it's 9 o'clock right now. So the Supreme Court announced a decision. So they reversed it. They overturned his conviction. The Supreme Court, by a vote of 7 to 2, overturned Curtis Flowers' conviction for the 1996 murder of four people in Tardy Furniture.
The Supreme Court has thrown out the murder conviction of a Mississippi death row inmate who has been tried six times. The justices agreed with Flowers' attorney that Mississippi prosecutor Doug Evans unlawfully and systematically blocked black potential jurors from hearing. This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I'm Madeline Barron. Today's decision by the Supreme Court means that Curtis Flowers is no longer a guilty man.
He's no longer convicted of the quadruple murder at Tardy Furniture. He's no longer sentenced to death. But Curtis is not a free man. He's still under indictment for those murders. So for now, he's still locked up while we wait to see whether District Attorney Doug Evans decides to try the case for a seventh time.
It's a good day. Hallelujah. We called up Sherri Lynn Johnson. She's one of Curtis's lawyers. She was the one who argued his case in front of the Supreme Court back in March.
You know, this is a case of gross injustice. And whether you're an imprisoned inmate or whether you're a regular citizen, this is an injustice that touches the heart. And that the Supreme Court would step out and try to right that injustice, I think, is encouraging to everyone. Not everyone felt that way.
Our reporter Raymond stopped by the house of Mary Catherine Briscoe. Hello, Mrs. Briscoe? She's the mother of Carmen Rigby, one of the people who was killed at Tardy Furniture. We thought it was over. We thought it was the end. That was my daughter he killed at Tardy Furniture Company. I don't know why you don't just leave it alone. We just have to go through this so many times. And I'm just about not able to do it. I'm 90 years old.
My son told me this morning, said, just don't think about it, and you cannot attend another trial. I'm just, I'm living alone. My husband died after four trials, and we knew we both may never live long enough to get it all settled, but I hope so. Raymond asked Ms. Briscoe whether today's news has changed how she thinks of the prosecutor, Doug Evans. No, no. He's done...
His part, I think. He's done what he could. And this, I know, is about worn him out, too. But it's terrible, terrible. I just don't want to think about going through it again. Ms. Briscoe told Raymond that she feels sorry for the families on both sides of the case, the families of the victims and Curtis' family. But the way she looks at it, the person at fault here is Curtis Flowers for bringing up these issues in the first place. I don't know why...
They just keep on and on with it. I just, I don't understand that. Because we was trying to forget everything and settle down the rest of our lives. So I can't understand why he can't do the same. Here's what today's Supreme Court opinion said. The majority opinion was written by the newest justice on the court, one of the conservative justices, Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He was joined by the four liberal justices and two of his fellow conservatives.
Justice Samuel Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts. The question the Supreme Court was looking at was whether DA Doug Evans had violated the U.S. Constitution by striking Black people from the jury because of their race, because they're Black. It's called a Batson violation. And in his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh said, that's exactly what happened. Justice Kavanaugh focused on a Black prospective juror named Carolyn Wright. DA Doug Evans had struck Carolyn Wright from the jury.
But Evans said he didn't do it because she was black. He had other reasons. Justice Kavanaugh went through each of D.A. Doug Evans' stated reasons for striking Carolyn Wright from the jury, and he knocked them down one by one. Like, for example, Doug Evans had said he struck Carolyn Wright because she knew a lot of witnesses in the case. But Justice Kavanaugh pointed out that there were three white prospective jurors who also knew a lot of witnesses, and Doug Evans barely questioned them about their relationships.
Ann Kavanaugh said, Curtis has always been tried by an all-white or mostly white jury. And the reason for that, the Supreme Court found, is because the state struck nearly every black prospective juror it could. The way Justice Kavanaugh saw it, this seemed deliberate. He wrote, quote,
The state's relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals strongly suggests that the state wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few Black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury. Justice Kavanaugh wrote, quote, And so Justice Kavanaugh and six other justices voted to reverse Curtis Flowers' conviction.
The decision that the court handed down today was a narrow one. The court could have decided to do something really big in the Flowers decision, something that would have affected lots of cases, something that could have made it easier for other defendants to prove that there was racial discrimination in jury selection in their cases. The court could have even gotten rid of peremptory strikes altogether, although no one really expected them to do that. Instead, the way the court crafted the decision didn't do much, according to the experts we spoke with,
to scare future prosecutors away from discriminating against African Americans in jury selection. This is a law professor at Washington University named Dan Epps. It's great, you know, for Mr. Flowers, you know, provides relief for him. But yeah, I don't think that this is going to eliminate this practice. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the dissent. It was almost as long as the majority opinion, 42 pages. Justice Thomas didn't just attack the arguments of Curtis's lawyer.
He attacked the court's previous ruling in the landmark case, Batson, that set up the rules for proving racial discrimination in jury selection. Justice Thomas called Batson, quote, a windfall to a convicted criminal. Justice Thomas also attacked his fellow justices for taking the case in the first place. Perhaps, he said, the court took Curtis's case because it had received a fair amount of media attention. And that, in Justice Thomas's eyes, is not a good thing.
He wrote, citing another court case, quote, the media often seeks to titillate rather than to educate and inform. Justice Thomas closed his dissent by saying, quote, if the court's opinion today has a redeeming quality, it is this. The state is perfectly free to convict Curtis Flowers again. Did you kill Marlene Johnson? I think you're one of the first people to have actually asked.
From WBUR and ZSP Media, this is Beyond All Repair, a podcast about an unsolved murder that will leave you questioning everything. Wow, it just gets more interesting. Beyond All Repair. All episodes are out now. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts. The man who gets to make that decision, to try to convict Curtis Flowers again, is the same person it's always been, District Attorney Doug Evans.
Our reporters Raymond Tungacar and Curtis Gilbert caught up with Doug Evans around lunchtime today as he was walking into a Mexican restaurant in Casillasco, one of the cities in his district. I was wondering if you'd just have a couple minutes to talk to us about the Supreme Court. Not right now because I hadn't even read the opinion. I mean, you're aware that it's been overturned? I am, but I have not seen it.
Doug Evans said he hasn't changed his mind about whether Curtis Flowers committed the murders. No question about his guilt there never has been. But he said he would wait until he read the Supreme Court's decision before deciding whether to try the case again for a seventh time. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision today marked the third time that a court had found Doug Evans violated the Constitution in the Flowers case by intentionally striking black people from the jury because of their race.
The last thing I just had to ask you was that three different courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have essentially found you violated the Constitution by excluding black jurors from the Flowers trials. And I was wondering if that would change anything about the way you prosecute cases in the future, do you think, as a result of that?
I've never struck anybody other than from comments that they made about that I felt like they could not be fair and impartial. And that's all I can tell you on that. But why have courts repeatedly found otherwise? Courts have also repeatedly found a lot of things. Courts are just like me and you. Everybody's got opinions. Who's calling? Oh, yeah.
Back at the Flowers' house in Winona, Archie Flowers' cell phone buzzed. Yeah? It was Curtis, calling from Parchman Prison. Hey, what you got going on? Yeah, well, it's probably all over town by now. So how you feeling, man? You said your prayer? You said your prayer there, boy? Oh, yeah. I was just here with friends.
So now Archie and Curtis are waiting to see what happens next.
What happens next is one of the things we'll be talking about in our next episode, which we'll get to you as soon as we can. In the Dark is reported and produced by me, Madeline Barron, senior producer Samara Fremark, producer Natalie Jablonski, associate producer Raymond Tungakar, and reporters Parker Yesko and Will Kraft. In the Dark is edited by Catherine Winter. Web editors are Dave Mann and Andy Cruz. The editor-in-chief of APM Reports is Chris Worthington.
He killed at least 19 people during the 1980s in South Africa. Very dark times. People were desperate. We were looking for him. We couldn't find him. And nobody knew where he was. Every single one of his victims was black. He reached such a stage where he was now hunting. World of Secrets from the BBC World Service. Season 3, The Apartheid Killer. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. ♪
No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.
Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. From PR.