According to Curtis Giovanni Flowers, the evidence that got his three previous death sentences reversed is the same evidence that most recently convicted him again.
In a 205-page appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court filed last week, Flowers asked that his fourth murder conviction be overturned and a new trial be granted.
In 2010, a Montgomery County jury convicted Flowers of the 1996 killings of four people at Tardy Furniture and sentenced him to death. The same year, a judge denied Flowers’ request for a seventh trial.
On the morning of July 16, 1996, Bertha Tardy, 59, and three of her employees were murdered execution-style in her furniture store. Each victim was shot in the head. Tardy and two employees died instantly. The fourth victim died in the hospital.
Flowers, 43, has been on death row for 16 years, having been convicted six times. Five of those verdicts have been overturned based on flawed testimony, circumstantial evidence and what the defense has called a defective trial.
The reasons for a defective trial, according to the defense, include a racially biased jury-selection process and the admission of unfair evidence.
According to Flowers’ latest appeal, “no physical evidence ever linked Flowers to the crimes, but the prosecution presented a series of witnesses intended to show that he could have stolen (a) gun, and was in the vicinity of the furniture store on the morning of the murders.”
The appeal goes on to call the state’s evidence implicating Flowers to be “so flimsy as to be constitutionally insufficient to sustain the convictions.”
The Mississippi Supreme Court is required to consider an appeal in all death penalty cases.
After Flowers’ first three convictions and death sentences, the state Supreme Court overturned the verdicts — twice for prosecutorial misconduct and once for racial bias in jury selection. Two subsequent trials ended with mistrials when juries could not reach a unanimous decision.
Flowers’ second trial was held in Harrison County. The other five have been held in Winona.
Although Montgomery County is at least 50 percent black, during Flowers’ sixth trial in 2010, most potential black jurors excluded themselves because of connections to Flowers or his family. That, says the appeal, presents an unfair racial makeup of the jury, making a fair verdict impossible. Flowers is black.
In his response to Flowers’ motion for a new trial in 2010, Circuit Judge Joseph Loper wrote, “Flowers certainly had the constitutional right to be tried in the county where the crimes were committed. However, he should not be heard to complain about the racial makeup of the jury, since the overwhelming majority of the members of his race stated that they could not sit in judgment of him because of kinships, friendships, and family ties.”
Prosecutors have argued that Flowers was a disgruntled former employee who sought revenge against Tardy because she withheld most of his pay to cover the cost of merchandise he damaged. Court records show nearly $300 was missing from the store. But the defense has claimed that the state could not tie Flowers to that evidence.
Flowers has no criminal background, and his appeal argues that prosecutors were careless in their fingerpointing in their haste to find a suspect.
In his appeal, Flowers also says the latest guilty verdict is not fair because of the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says that no person should be tried for the same offense after an acquittal, a conviction, a retrial after certain mistrials or multiple punishments.
Flowers is the only American to be tried six times for the same crime. The case has received both national and international attention.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Flowers had been convicted six times.
Flowers appeal
