Curtis Flowers

Curtis Giovanni Flowers was born on 29 May 1970 and raised in Winona, a small town in Montgomery County, Mississippi, about 90 miles north of Jackson. He was one of six children of Archie and Lola Flowers, a close, churchgoing family. His mother was a home health aide and an active member of Mount Vernon Missionary Baptist Church in Winona. His father sang in gospel groups for about 40 years.

In a 2020 interview with In the Dark, Flowers remembered family cookouts, how he first began singing gospel, and his high school dream of becoming a firefighter. Before his arrest he sang on most Sundays, including as lead singer with The Unionaires, a gospel group he shared with his father. In 1999, just before his second trial, his parents' house burned down, and the family lost almost every photograph of him.

On 16 July 1996 four people were shot and killed at Tardy Furniture in Winona: owner Bertha Tardy and employees Robert Golden, Carmen Rigby and Derrick Stewart, who was 16. Flowers had worked at the store briefly and had been fired 13 days before the killings. Investigators pointed to eyewitnesses who said they had seen him in town that morning, footprints and ballistics linked to a gun stolen from his uncle's car, and later to jailhouse informants. He was arrested in January 1997 and maintained his innocence throughout.

District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted all six trials. In 1997 Flowers was convicted of murdering Bertha Tardy and sentenced to death. A second trial in 1999 for the murder of one of the employees also ended in a death sentence. The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned both because of prosecutorial misconduct. A third trial in 2004, for all four murders, ended in another conviction, overturned in 2007 because Evans had discriminated against Black jurors. The fourth (2007) and fifth (2008) trials ended in hung juries.

In June 2010 a jury of eleven white jurors and one Black juror convicted him on four counts of capital murder after about 30 minutes of deliberation and sentenced him to death. The Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 2014. In June 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back for review of racial bias in jury selection, and in November 2017 the Mississippi court affirmed the conviction again. Flowers spent more than 20 years at Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, much of it in solitary conditions on death row.

In 2018 the second season of American Public Media's podcast In the Dark, reported and hosted by Madeleine Baran, examined the case in depth. The team found witnesses who said they had lied or been pressured, documented that a gun that might have been the murder weapon disappeared after it was turned over to police, identified alternative suspects, and analysed decades of court records showing that Evans struck Black prospective jurors at a far higher rate than white ones. The season reached millions of listeners and its findings were cited in the legal fight that followed.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal on 2 November 2018 and heard argument on 20 March 2019. On 21 June 2019 it ruled 7 to 2 in Flowers v. Mississippi that Evans had violated the Constitution by striking Black jurors. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority, and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

On 16 December 2019 Judge Joey Loper granted bail of $250,000, noting that several key witnesses had recanted. Flowers walked out of jail in Louisville, Mississippi, with his sister Priscilla Ward at his side, wearing an ankle monitor and confined to his home. Evans recused himself in January 2020. On 4 September 2020 Attorney General Lynn Fitch moved to dismiss the indictments, saying no credible case remained, and Judge Loper dismissed them with prejudice. The ankle monitor came off that afternoon.

After his release Flowers spoke about his faith, his family and the long adjustment to freedom. He told 60 Minutes in early 2021 that the adjustment had been slow and described nights at Parchman as like a nightmare. In a 2021 interview with WLBT he said he had married a woman who began writing to him while he was in prison, that he hoped to become a father, and that he expected to move away from Mississippi. A book was in the works and he had been approached about a film. He continued to sing gospel with his father when he could, and credited his late mother with keeping him strong.

Flowers consistently said his religious faith and his family carried him through more than two decades in prison. He spoke about forgiveness, hope and moving forward, while also calling for a fairer legal system. When the charges were dropped he said that with a family that never gave up on him, he knew the day of freedom would come.

Flowers v. Mississippi became a leading modern ruling on the Batson rule against race-based jury strikes, and his case is taught in law schools and cited in debates over prosecutorial power, the death penalty and wrongful convictions. It also showed how investigative journalism can change the course of a criminal case. In 2021 he sued Evans and three investigators in federal court over their conduct in the investigation. The 1996 Tardy Furniture murders remain unsolved, and the victims' families have spoken of their own continuing grief.

In 2021 Mississippi agreed to pay Flowers $500,000, the maximum compensation allowed under the state's wrongful incarceration law, at $50,000 a year for ten years. The In the Dark season about his case won wide acclaim, and he appeared at public events, including at Duke Law's Wilson Center for Science and Justice, to speak about justice and innocence.

His case was the subject of season two of In the Dark (APM Reports, 2018 to 2020), including a final 2020 episode built on a long interview with Flowers himself. He was interviewed by Sharyn Alfonsi for CBS 60 Minutes (January 2021) and by WLBT for the special report Curtis Flowers: The Other Side of Freedom (August 2021). The U.S. Supreme Court argument in Flowers v. Mississippi is publicly available as audio.

Montgomery County Coroner Allan Pratt said Flowers' body was found on Wednesday, 7 October 2026, and that his death was an ongoing investigation. No cause of death had been released when his death was reported by Mississippi Today, WLBT and WJTV that evening. He was 56.