For the first time in American history, the State of Mississippi tried Curtis Flowers for capital murder for the sixth time based on the same evidence. Mr. Flowers was just convicted and sentenced to death for the fourth time.
The Flowers case has been highly controversial. Three previous times, Flowers has been sentenced to death only to have the verdict overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct, detailed here in one of the appeals court decisions that overturned a previous verdict.
This case has helped highlight Mississippi's long history of prosecutorial misconduct and abuse. The medical examiner who testified in the case, Dr. Steven Hayne, was removed from the list of qualified Medical Examiners in Mississippi after a long history of false testimony and shoddy work, exposed by Reason Magazine's Radley Balko among others. Dr. Hayne's testimony led to the overturning of two capital convictions.
This case has also brought to the forefront continued racial tensions in Mississippi. The Mississippi legislature passed a bill to allow the prosecutor to apply for a change of venue, specifically to obtain a whiter jury pool for Flowers' retrial. This bill was sponsored by Republican State Senator Lydia Chassaniol, a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
And who are the Council of Conservative Citizens? Here is the report of the Southern Poverty Law Center:
The Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) is the modern reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South. Created in 1985 from the mailing lists of its predecessor organization, the CCC, which initially tried to project a "mainstream" image, has evolved into a crudely white supremacist group whose website has run pictures comparing pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape and referred to blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity." The group's newspaper, Citizens Informer, regularly publishes articles condemning "race mixing," decrying the evils of illegal immigration, and lamenting the decline of white, European civilization.
In Its Own Words
"God is the author of racism. God is the One who divided mankind into different types. ... Mixing the races is rebelliousness against God."
— Council of Conservative Citizens website, 2001
The Anti-Defamation League reports on the continued involvement of the CCC in politics:
The CCC has enjoyed connections with public officials at every level. In Mississippi, all five members of the Lamar County Supervisors Board attended a 2001 meeting of the group's Piney Woods Chapter that addressed county zoning and its potential infringement on the rights of property owners and on the "ongoing battle to save our beloved state flag." Other prominent mainstream political figures have attended meetings or addressed the group, including past Alabama Governor Guy Hunt, United States Representative Mel Hancock, Alabama Public Service Commissioner George C. Wallace, Jr., Tennessee G.O.P. National Committeewoman Alice Algood, South Carolina G.O.P. National Committeeman Buddy Witherspoon, former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson, as well as media figures like editorial cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez, Accuracy In Media head Reed Irvine, and Joseph Sobran, a syndicated columnist and former senior editor for the National Review whose anti-Jewish bias contributed to his firing by that magazine.
It is therefore not surprising that, according to Alan Bean who covered the trial for the blog Friends of Justice, the trial was marked by incidents such as this:
On the way out of the courthouse, the father of one of the slain victims confronted Curtis Flowers’ sister, Priscilla. "We always knew that nigger was guilty anyway," he barked. Sheriff’s deputies quickly descended on the scene.
This is what justice all too often looks like in Mississippi and much of the United States, to this day. A prosecution which was overturned for abuse three prior times. A medical examiner whose false testimony has sullied hundreds of prosecutions and put at least two innocent men on death row once again employed in a capital case.
And a man who, for the fourth time, faces a sentence of death by lethal injection.