Op-Ed Columnist |
| The Supreme Court recently threw out the quadruple murder conviction of Curtis Flowers, a Mississippi man whom I’ve written about before. It was a good decision. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing an opinion signed by six other justices, documented the numerous dishonest methods that the prosecutor used to keep African-Americans off the jury at Flowers’s trial. |
| In today’s newsletter, though, I want to focus on a single paragraph from the dissent, which Justice Clarence Thomas wrote. (Justice Neil Gorsuch joined much of the dissent.) The paragraph betrays a distressing disregard for evidence that’s symbolic of a much larger problem in our justice system. |
| The paragraph is near the beginning of the 42-page dissent, and it summarizes what Thomas evidently considers to be the strongest evidence against Flowers: |
| “On the morning of the murders, a .380-caliber pistol was reported stolen from the car of Flowers’ uncle, and a witness saw Flowers by that car before the shootings. Officers recovered .380-caliber bullets at Tardy Furniture [the site of the murders] and matched them to bullets fired by the stolen pistol. Gunshot residue was found on Flowers’ hand a few hours after the murders. A bloody footprint found at the scene matched both the size of Flowers’ shoes and the shoe style that he was seen wearing on the morning of the murders. Multiple witnesses placed Flowers near Tardy Furniture that morning, and Flowers provided inconsistent accounts of his whereabouts. Several hundred dollars were missing from the store’s cash drawer, and $235 was found hidden in Flowers’ headboard after the murders.” |
| Anyone who has followed this case — especially anyone who has listened to “In the Dark,” a prize-winning podcast from Madeleine Baran, Samara Freemark and their colleagues at American Public Media — knows that much of this evidence falls apart under scrutiny. |
| To take a few examples: An investigator for the district attorney appears to have fabricated evidence about the shoes. Investigators also seem to have coached witnesses to remember — months later — seeing Flowers near the furniture store. The $235 apparently found at Flowers’s home doesn’t match the amount taken from the store. And the test for gunshot residue wasn’t done until after Flowers had been interrogated at a police station, where small amounts of residue are common. The amount of residue on Flowers’s hands? A single particle. |
| If you listen to the podcast, you come away amazed by the thinness of the evidence against him and by the willingness of police and prosecutors to exaggerate it. To this day, no witness has tied Flowers to the scene of the crime, nor has any reliable physical evidence. More than one witness has recanted testimony given at trial. |
| I can’t say for sure that Flowers is innocent. But based on the evidence I’ve heard, I would vote to acquit him without agonizing over it. The case against him is shockingly weak and relies on claims by the prosecution that have been proven to be false. |
| Yet Thomas and Gorsuch don’t appear to have engaged with any of this evidence. They simply accepted the version of events offered by the prosecutor — Doug Evans, a man with a record of lying in court. |
| Curtis Flowers remains behind bars, where he has been since 1997, while the same prosecutor decides whether to try him again. Many other Americans — most of them black and male, like Flowers — also sit in prison or jail today because of evidence that judges or prosecutors refuse to acknowledge as flimsy or manufactured. |
| It reminds of me a heartbreaking quotation in “Just Mercy,” Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 book about systemic injustice: “They aren’t ever going to admit they made a mistake,” says a man unjustly convicted of murder. “They know I didn’t do this. They just can’t admit to being wrong, to looking bad.” |
