An alternate juror from Curtis Giovanni Flowers’ fifth capital murder trial will serve a 15-month jail sentence and probation after pleading guilty to two counts of perjury on Monday.
Mary Purnell was sentenced to 10 years on each count. The two sentences will run concurrently, or at the same time. She was ordered to serve 15 months, followed by two years of supervised probation, and then spend the rest of the 10-year term on unsupervised probation.
During the supervised probation, she will have to report to an officer of the Department of Corrections each month.
Her trial was scheduled to begin Monday in Belzoni.
During jury selection for the Flowers trial, Purnell told the court that she didn’t know Flowers or his family.
However, court officials later found she had received many phone calls from Carroll-Montgomery Regional Correctional Facility, where Flowers and her son were housed. Her name was also discovered on Flowers’ visitation list.
Purnell admitted to Circuit Judge Joseph H. Loper Jr. that she had received the calls. Loper ordered her arrest on Sept. 24, 2008, about four hours after testimony had begun.
Another juror, James Franklin Bibbs, also was charged with perjury, accused of lying to get on the jury. Bibbs’ charges were dropped in October after the state attorney general’s office decided the evidence was insufficient.
Flowers was charged in the 1996 shooting deaths of Tardy Furniture store owner Bertha Tardy and three store employees: Carmen Rigby, Derrick “Bobo” Stewart and Robert Golden.
He has been tried five times. In the first three of those, he was convicted and sentenced to death, but all of those convictions were overturned on appeal.
Jurors could not reach a verdict in the fourth trial or the fifth trial.
A sixth trial has been scheduled for June 7, 2010 in Winona, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Flowers has maintained for more than a decade that he is innocent.
