JACKSON, Miss. Death row inmate Curtis Giovanni Flowers has won a new trial for killing four people at a Winona furniture store because prosecutors sought to keep blacks off his Montgomery County jury.
\nThe Mississippi Supreme Court decision came today (Thursday).
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\nFlowers had argued before the justices in a February hearing that race discrimination in the selection of the jury cast doubt on the fairness of his trial.<\/p>\n
Flowers, 35, who is black, was convicted in 2004 of capital murder in the deaths of four people during a shooting spree at a Winona furniture store in 1996. Death penalty cases are automatically reviewed by the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
Twice before, Flowers was convicted of capital murder involving one of the victims and each time his conviction and death sentence were thrown out on appeal.<\/p>\n
In 2004, Flowers was convicted of all four murders _ store owner Bertha Tardy, 59; store employees Derrick Stewart, 16, and Carmen Rigby, 45; and delivery man Robert Golden, 42. Flowers also was convicted of robbing the store of at least 400-dollars that was in the cash drawer.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, said the trial judge erred in upholding prosecutors’ peremptory strikes exercised against two blacks in the jury pool.<\/p>\n
Since 1986, prosecutors have been barred from disqualifying potential jurors based on their race. One thing prosecutors must show is that they had a race neutral reason to excuse a potential juror.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JACKSON, Miss. Death row inmate Curtis Giovanni Flowers has won a new trial for killing four people at a Winona furniture store because prosecutors sought to keep blacks off his Montgomery County jury. The Mississippi Supreme Court decision came today (Thursday).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-furniture-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}