Curtis Flowers, a Mississippi man who spent nearly 23 years in prison, has filed a lawsuit against the district attorney who prosecuted him six times.
Curtis Flowers was released in December 2019 after the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out the conviction and death sentence from his sixth trial. The district attorney alleged that in 1996, he killed four people at a furniture store.
The justices said that prosecutors, led by Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans, showed an unconstitutional pattern of excluding African American jurors in his trial.
Through Flowers’s trials, 61 of the 72 jurors were white.
The suit says Evans and the investigators were guilty of “pressuring witnesses to fabricate claims about seeing Mr. Flowers in particular locations on the day of the murders” and ignoring other possible suspects.
“Given the absence of any solid evidence against Mr. Flowers, defendants engaged in repeated misconduct to fabricate a case that never should have been brought,” reads the suit.
Evans did not recuse himself from the case until 2020.
“I have personally prosecuted the defendant in all six of his prior trials,” Evans wrote in a court filing. “While I remain confident in both the investigation and jury verdicts in this matter, I have come to the conclusion that my continued involvement will prevent the families from obtaining justice and from the defendant being held responsible for his actions.”
Rob McDuff of the Mississippi Center for Justice, a lawyer for Flowers, said his client “never should have been charged.”
“Curtis Flowers was 26 years old with no criminal record and nothing in his history to suggest he would commit a crime like this,” McDuff said per The New York Times. “The prosecution was tainted throughout by racial discrimination and repeated misconduct. This lawsuit seeks accountability for that misconduct.”
