Curtis Flowers to request bond today

Attorneys for Curtis Flowers, 49, today will request that their client receive a bond so that he can get out of jail. The hearing will be held at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Winona, Miss.

Flowers has been tried six times for the same crime by the same prosecutor, and has been in prison for 23 years, nearly half his life. More than 20 years of that time has been on death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

Flowers was first arrested in 1996 for the murder of four people at the Hardy Furniture store in Winona.

In two of his trials, juries could not agree on a verdict, causing mistrials. In the other four trials, prosecutor Doug Evans got guilty verdicts; however, all four were reversed on appeal due to prosecutorial misconduct, three by the Mississippi Supreme Court and one by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The last ruling came in June, once again overturning a death penalty conviction. “The state’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the state wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury,” wrote Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in the majority decision.

Since that ruling, Flowers is being held at the Winston-Chickasaw Regional Correctional Facility awaiting word on whether Evans will try him a seventh time.