BBC correspondent, Tom Mangold was the first reporter to build an in-depth television story around Jena, Louisiana.  Now the British journalist has the distinction of being the first reporter in any medium to address the social currents swirling around the case of Curtis Flowers.  I have pasted the brief article that appears on the BBC website below, but  the twenty-eight minute audio version of the story that played on BBC Radio goes into much greater depth.

Tom Mangold first contacted me seven years ago when he developed an interest in the Tulia drug bust.  At the time, the credibility of undercover agent Tom Coleman’s was still more or less intact, but that didn’t seem to bother Mangold.  He was more interested in the social context of the story and what it said about George W. Bush’s America.  The guilt-innocence issue was of strictly secondary importance.

You can see the same broad focus in Mangold’s treatment of the Flowers story.  As with Tulia and Jena, the sheer ambiguity of the facts elicit strongly divergent reactions that break along racial and ideological lines. 

In my blogging thus far, I have had little to say about the legal case against Flowers (that will change as the June 2010 trial approaches).   I provided some background assistance in the production of the BBC story but I made no attempt to affect the content and had no idea what Mr. Mangold would do with the Flowers case.  Friends of Justice doesn’t tell reporters how to do their job; we simply make obscure stories accessible to journalists and advocacy groups by placing the facts in their historical and social context.

If you listen to the extended audio version of this story you will hear Mangold ask Curtis Flowers if he killed Bertha Tardy and three of her employees.  “No, sir,” Flowers replies, “I did not.” 

The BBC correspondent asks Flowers if he believes he will one day be exonerated.  “Yes, sir, I do” Flowers says.

Mangold asks if Flowers believes this because he has confidence in “the Lord” or because he has confidence in the fairness of the criminal justice system.  Flowers says his conviction is religious.  Asked if he believes in the criminal justice system, Flowers answers without hesitation: “No, sir, I do not.”

Roxanne Ballard, Bertha Tardy’s daughter, isn’t sure that justice will be served in this case.  She is convinced that Flowers is 100% guilty, but she has no idea how the legal process will play out and wonders what will happen if Mississippi is unable to secure a final conviction.

Mangold’s interview with members of the Council of Conservative Citizens on the audio version is a real eye-opener.  The CCC folks come off as pleasant and polite, but they would clearly return to the social mores of 1960 if they had the option.

You can find a link to the audio version of this story at the conclusion of the text version.  Read, listen, and tell us what you think.

Facing a sixth trial for the same crime

By Tom Mangold

Radio 4, Crossing Continents

Curtis Flowers, a 39-year-old African American is to stand trial for an unprecedented sixth time for murder of four people in Mississippi in 1996. So far, two of his trials have resulted in mistrials and three in convictions that were later overturned.

James Bibbs, also an African American, was a juror in Mr Flowers’ 2008 trial, which ended in a mistrial. He was the only one of the 12 to vote against a conviction.

At the end of the trial, Mr Bibbs was hauled in front of the judge, harangued, threatened, arrested in court, led away in handcuffs, charged with perjury and spent the night in prison.

Mr Bibbs is in his early 60s. He’s a retired school teacher, a Vietnam veteran, a local football referee – a patently decent man who was shocked by what had happened.

“The judge got real loud, and he said ‘you are lying, you committed perjury’. I was disappointed, all these years you do all these things for the community, then you are called a liar like that out in the public, it was degrading.”

The judge’s outburst (the perjury charge has since been quietly dropped) came in a case that is extraordinary for many reasons.

Unprecedented

The prosecution of Curtis Flowers casts a sharp light on racial attitudes in America’s South one year after the election of the nation’s first black President.

He has been sentenced to death three times, only for each trial to be overturned on appeal because of what the Mississippi Supreme Court described as prosecutorial misconduct. In one further trial, the jury failed to agree after dividing broadly on racial lines.

In the fifth trial, James Bibbs voted for acquittal, and a unanimous verdict was required.

Mr Flowers has spent 13 years on remand in prison.

The local district attorney, desperate to score a conviction in such a high-profile case, has played it dirty to win.

One of his tricks, exposed by a refreshingly impartial Mississippi Supreme Court, was to fiddle the jury selection to exclude black jurors.

Paradoxically, the DA is not generally held to be a racist himself.

Just to complicate matters even further, Curtis Flowers does have a strong case to answer.

He had a motive.

Mr Flowers had been employed by the owner of a furniture store who sacked him. There was a dispute about money owing.

Subsequently someone walked into the store, shot the owner and then coldly massacred three other employees. Mr Flowers has never produced an alibi for that terrible morning.

For his defence, the scientific forensic evidence against him is wafer thin, and some witness evidence is contentious.

Post-racial society

The murders took place in the small town of Winona, in the heart of a state with the worst civil rights record in the US.

Winona is not far from Philadelphia, MS, where three white civil rights workers were infamously murdered in the early 60s – a story captured in the film Mississippi Burning.

The lynchings, the cross burnings, the overt violence and discrimination have long since disappeared.

But even one year after Obama and the dream of a post-racial society, the Flowers case shows how short the march away from old attitudes has been.

The local state senator, Lydia Chassaniol has won few African-American hearts by introducing a bill that would widen the jury pool in such a way that critics say would make it easier to select an all-white jury.

She has joined a local chapter of the right-wing Council for Conservative Citizens and addressed their annual conference.

“I’ll talk to anyone who wants me to talk to them,” the senator told me, stressing her role as official tourist booster for the state.

But meet members of the council, as I did, in a modest motel outside Winona, and the nature of this rump of the red-neck, good ‘ole white boys, confederate-flag-wavers is striking.

Their hatred of inter-racial marriage, homosexuals, liberals (aka communists) identifies an atavistic streak that still remains 150 years after slavery.

As one of them told me: “It’s alright for them (non-whites) to practise their culture but they should not take ours away from us. We are probably the most discriminated race in the country.”

Mr Flowers faces a sixth trial next June. In Britain, natural justice would have made it likely that the prosecution would be dropped after the second mistrial.

But this is Winona Mississippi and a black man accused of a quadruple murder will not be allowed to walk away.

Black president or not, the state and its judicial servants are not ready for that yet.

Crossing Continents: Mississippi Smouldering is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday, 26 November 2009 at 1100 GMT and repeated on Monday, at 2030 GMT.