(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

The Curtis Flowers case was featured Monday night on “The Take-Away” a public radio program.  According to their website, “The show is a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in collaboration with The BBC World Service, New York Times Radio and WGBH Boston.”  Guests Charlie Smith of the Greenwood Commonwealth and Shaila Dewan, the author of a recent NYT piece on racial bias in jury selection appear as guests.

For fourteen years this case has languished in obscurity.  Those days may finally be over.

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

While Winona’s black community runs scared, would-be jurors are running a scam.

It started early.  District Attorney Doug Evans was working through his standard voir dire questions. “Anything you’ve heard outside the courtroom needs to be dropped at the door,” he told the six dozen jurors remaining in the jury venire. “Does anyone think they couldn’t do that?”

An earnest-looking white woman raised her hand. “I don’t think I could,” she said.  She had formed an opinion about the case, she explained, and no evidence she heard in the courtroom could possibly change her mind.

A black woman’s hand shot into the air. “I don’t think I could either,” she reported.

Seconds later, three more black jurors were saying the same thing.

Then the prosecutor asked if there was anyone who didn’t feel they could stand in judgment of another human being.

Eleven hands were raised, two white and nine black.

Ray Carter, Mr. Flowers lead counsel, used all his lawyerly skills to rehabilitate most of these people—if only for the time being. Most of them were desperate to avoid jury duty.

“Mr. Flowers is not guilty,” Carter told his captive audience. “In fact, Mr. Flowers is innocent.”

“This is improper,” Doug Evans roared, his voice dripping with indignation.

Carter was undeterred. He had expected this response.

“Judge,” he explained calmly, “I don’t want anyone to think that just because Curtis Flowers has been tried over and over again, that he’s guilty.”

Then the black attorney turned his attention to the jurors who claimed they couldn’t stand in judgment. Carter knew what they were thinking. Most of them didn’t believe Curtis Flowers was guilty, but they feared a powerful backlash from leading lights within the white community if they voted their conscience.

Almost all the “couldn’t-sit-in-judgment” people are economically dependent on influential white people, but it goes deeper than that. They wonder what would happen if their children or their grandchildren got cross-ways with the law. Would the authorities retaliate against the-guy-that-hung-the-jury-in-2010? Maybe not, but how can you be sure?

“I know some of you are uncomfortable being here,” Carter said. “But sometimes in life we are asked to do things we don’t like to do.”

Carter called one of the jurors who used the can’t-sit-in-judgment dodge by name. “Did you tell Mr. Evans you couldn’t sit in judgment, or did you just say you didn’t want to?”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t,” the woman explained, “I said I didn’t want to.”

Several black jurors adjusted their earlier comments, but others refused to budge. “I couldn’t do it,” one woman explained. “The ones who are in there, the decision that they would make, I couldn’t agree with it.”

Translation: “All those white folks are going to convict, I wouldn’t be able to go along, and I’m afraid I’d pay dearly. Either that, or I’d cave in to pressure and hate myself for the rest of my life.”

Most of the remaining white jurors are sincere Christians struggling to do the right thing. Everyone in their social world believes Curtis is guilty. It’s settled orthodoxy, like believing in God. A healthy percentage of white jurors freely admit that, from where they sit, Curtis Flowers looks guilty and no amount of evidence is going to change that belief.

Another subset of white jurors is capable of maintaining an open-mind on the guilt-innocence issue. They live on the borders of Winona’s social mainstream and haven’t been directly affected by the wagon-circling and the rush to judgment.

Then we have the smiling members of the juror class. These folks are desperate for a conviction but know they can’t admit as much. They attend church with the victims’ families, they see them socially, and, back in the day, they went to school with them. Nonetheless, they could put all that aside. They could wipe their minds of all prejudgments and remove every twinge of empathy and compassion from their hearts.

These men and women are perjuring themselves to get on the jury.

But the slightest suggestion that these folks might be less than sincere is greeted with howls of protest (literally) from Evans and Loper. If white jurors claim to be fair and impartial, they are.

At one point, Ray Carter tried to explain to the jurors that white people sometimes have trouble identifying black people, and vice versa.

Doug Evans bellowed his objection and Judge Loper sustained. “This trial isn’t about black and white,” Loper sermonized, “it’s about right and wrong and it’s about guilt and innocence.”

Really? Does the Judge believe his own rhetoric?

On some level, I think he does. Loper spent most of Day Two defending the white con artists working the room. Loper and Evans worked like experienced tag team partners.

There is something unnerving about DA Evans and his pet judge. Joey Loper lives in a world of legal platitudes and fair-and-impartial jurors who know instinctively when the state has passed the threshold of reasonable doubt.

Race is never an issue in Loperland. All-white juries are fine and dandy because race doesn’t matter. State witnesses can be trusted because they’re just doing their civic duty (at $30,000 a pop).

In Loperland, jurors work in pristine isolation from their peers—there is no such thing as jury psychology or a herd mentality, just earnest citizens motivated by persuasive evidence.

In Loperland, race is a myth and social class is a mirage. There is no history and no sociology.

In Loperland, prosecutors always operate in good faith, defendants are always guilty and defense attorneys (if they know what’s good for them) yield gracefully to the inevitable.

But while Judge Loper and DA Evans turn a blind eye to the obvious, I am beginning to wonder if a credible jury can be selected from this kind of venire.

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

At the end of the fifth Curtis Flowers trial, Judge Joey Loper pitched a hissy fit.  A black juror named James Bibbs sparked Loper’s outrage by holding out for acquittal.

Judge Loper told DA Doug Evans to charge Bibbs with perjury.  Then he ordered Evans to cobble together a new law that would enable the prosecution to expand the jury pool beyond the borders of Montgromery County.

Evans complied on both counts.

The Mississippi Attorney Generals Office frustrated plan one by dropping the perjury charges against James Bibbs.

Then the black chair of the House Judiciary Committee frustrated plan two by refusing to let “The Flowers bill” make it to the house floor.

But there was method in the Judge’s madness.  He wanted black jurors to learn from James Bibbs’ example.  Message: if you hang a jury in my courtroom you might find yourself on trial.

You could feel the fear in the courthouse in the Montgomery County courthouse today.

The jury pool had already been cut from 600 to 156 when we arrived for day one of Curtis Flowers’ trial; by the end of the day only 76 jurors remained.

There were four categories of people in the room: category one people were the folks decent enough to admit that they had formed an opinion about the case too strong to be shaken by the evidence produced at trial; category two people in were desperate to be on the jury; category three folks weren’t fussy about jury duty but were willing to serve if their number came up; finally, category four people were desperate to get off the jury.

The eighty people eliminated from consideration today were a mixture of category one and category four people.  It was refreshing to hear jurors freely admit that they couldn’t be objective.  Black jurors and white jurors generally disagreed about the guilt-innocence issue, but they knew they weren’t going to change their minds.

Then there were the category four people–the ones scarecd to death of ending up on the jury.   One woman said that if her elderly pastor testified she might give too much weight to his testimony.  Fortunately, that didn’t qualify as a strike for cause–but she’ll think of another reason she can’t be on the jury, rest assured.

Category two people had no such qualms–they were willing to say whatever it took to stay in contention for a coveted jury slot.  One man admitted that he was really, really close to three of the innocent victims murdered at the Tardy Furniture Store in 1996, but swore he could still be trusted to weigh the evidence fairly and objectively.

Judge Loper, as the law demands, took these people at their word.

Some white jurors want to escape jury duty because they are terrified by the prospect of sentencing a human being to death.  Many black jurors imagine themselves staring into the faces of nine, ten, or eleven white folks who think Curtis Flowers done the deed.  It’s a no-win proposition.  Stand your ground and you are a perennial social outcast; cave in and you’ve got to live with your conscience.

If Curtis Flowers was white, no DA in the state of Mississippi would try to convict him.  You can’t pin a case this weak on a white man.

If Curtis Flowers went to trial in Jackson, he would likely be acquitted by a true jury of his peers.

But Curtis is a black man going to trial in Montgomery County.  Most black residents think he’s innocent, but it might not matter.

If white jurors do what they are inclined to do (convict), they consolidate their standing in the community.  If black jurors do what they are inclined to do (acquit) they become outcasts along the lines of James Bibbs.

That’s why the small number of black jurors who survive the rigors of voir dire will be tempted to cast their lot with the white majority.

Day one of the Curtis Flowers trial had its high points.  At least ten observers were in the courtroom; some responding to an invitation from Friends of Justice, others attending on their own initiative.  I met some splendid people and ate some great Southern cooking.

But my eyes kept wandering to the man on trial.  Newcomers kept mistaking Curtis for a lawyer–he certainly looked the part.  But he’s got to be frightened.  After asserting his innocence for fourteen years and enduring five jury trials the fatigue must be crushing.

At the end of the day, Curtis is the only person in the room who can justify his fear.

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

CNN’s Emanuella Grinberg has written an excellent primer on the case of Curtis Flowers on the verge of his sixth trial.  Five out-of-town observers have already arrived in Winona and more are on the way.  For your convenience, I have pasted the story below, but I urge you to go to the CNN website and add your comment to the unfolding discussion.  While it is impossible to touch on all the jaw-dropping aspects of this story, Ms. Grinberg has clearly done her homework and has unpacked most of the big issues.

More on the Flowers case can be found here.

Mississippi man faces sixth capital murder trial in 1996 shootings

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

Sheila Byrd of the Associated Press has written the first story on the sixth trial of Curtis Flowers to appear in the national media.   (Charlie Smith of the Greenwood Commonwealth has a story on Tuesday’s hearing in Winona that is also worthy of your attention.)

My views on the Flowers case are featured prominently in Byrd’s article, largely because attorneys on both sides have decided to withhold comment.  I have posted the text of Byrd’s article as it appears in the Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald.

Flowers’ 6th trial in ’96 murders draws attention

By SHELIA BYRD – Associated Press Writer

A University of Michigan Study suggests that the college students of today are 40 percent less empathetic than students twenty or thirty years ago.  Sarah Konrath, one of the researchers involved in the study, blames technology: “The increase in exposure to media during this time period could be one factor,” she says.  “Compared to 30 years ago, the average American now is exposed to three times as much non-work-related information. In terms of media content, this generation of college students grew up with video games, and a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.”

Edward O’Brien, another researcher associated with the study, feels that social networking technology is part of the problem.  “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline. College students today may be so busy worrying about themselves and their own issues that they don’t have time to spend empathizing with others, or at least perceive such time to be limited.”

Could be.  But I am inclined to see the empathy gap as an indication that the Reagan Revolution has been far more successful than anyone imagined.  Since 1980, the dominant political message has branded empathy as futile, weak and counterproductive.  There is no sense trying to help people, we are told, it just makes them dependent and pathetic.  This being the case, the best strategy is to pursue naked self interest, leave the less fortunate to suffer the consequences of their laziness, and this will become the best of all possible worlds.

That message, praise God, wasn’t much of a factor when I was a kid.  Inspired by the non-violent direct action unleashed by the civil rights movement, thousands of young people, black and white, decended on the Southern states to work for integration and black voter registration.  Between 1961 and 1964, empathy reigned in America. 

The first wave of civil rights leaders were inspired by a vision they called “the beloved community.”  A 1974 article in the Christian Century argued that Martin Luther King was pushing for integration, not desegregation: 

Desegregation [King said] will only produce “a society where men are physically desegregated and spiritually segregated, where elbows are together and hearts apart. It gives us social togetherness and spiritual apartness. It leaves us with a stagnant equality of sameness rather than a constructive equality of oneness.” But integration will bring in an entirely different kind of society whose character is best summed up in the phrase “Black and White Together” — the title of one of the chapters of Why We Can’t Wait and the theme of one stanza of the civil rights movement’s hymn “We Shall Overcome.” Integration will enlarge “the concept of brotherhood to a vision of total interrelatedness.”

Who is holding up a vision of the beloved community in today’s America?  No one in the media spotlight, that’s for sure.  

When President Obama suggested that empathy was a desirable quality in a Supreme Court nominee he was roundly criticized.   Wendy Long, legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network who once clerked for Clarence Thomas, spoke for many when she said that Obama “thinks judges should have empathy for certain litigants who come before them. Of course if you have empathy for everybody who comes before you, there are two sides to every case. If you have empathy for both sides then that’s the same as having no empathy at all. So what he means is he wants empathy for one side and what’s wrong with that is it is being partial instead of being impartial. A judge is supposed to have empathy for no one but simply to follow the law.”

Why is having empathy for both sides the same as having no empathy at all?  Universal empathy was the heart and soul of the beloved community King and others pursued.  The Wendy Long’s of this world believe that compassion begins and ends with the family and the clan.  In the early 1960s, America was still deciding if the enormous military and geographical reach fashioned out of World War II necessity would be dismanteled or sustained.  The decision to get serious in Vietnam was a resounding vote for imperial hegemony. 

Empathy and empire are antithetical.

You can see the new reality in the courtroom.  If the defendant is poor and black he is guilty.  No evidence is required.  To weigh the evidence fairly is itself an exercise in empathy and we have lost the capacity for that kind of thing.  Most Americans have lost the capacity to give a damn about marginalized people.  People of color who make it out of the hood rarely look back.  To enter Middle America, it seems, we must check our hearts at the door.

Can we rekindle the beloved-community-fire in our day?  Yes, but only if we set aside the coarse, unlovely assumptions of a cynical society.  We have lost far more than we realize.   Small, intentional counter cultures must be created virtually from scratch.

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

A new report from the Equal Justice Initiative suggests that racial bias in the jury selection process is rampant, especially in Southern states.  No one who has spent much time in a courtroom, especially in small southern towns, will take issue with this finding.

Do prosecutors believe they are more likely to get a conviction from an all-white jury when the victim is white and the defendant is black?

Of course they do.  But it goes deeper than that.

You rarely see prosecutors trying to limit the number of white jurors when the defendant is white; so why is the mirror image of this phenomenon such a prominent feature of judicial life in America?

As the EJI study suggests, prosecutorial bias against black jurors is particularly marked when the defendant is African American and the death penalty is on the line.  African Americans, as a group, aren’t crazy about the death penalty, largely because it is used disproportionately against people of color.

In a groundbreaking study, Mark Pefley of the University of Kentucky and John Hurwitz of the University of Pittsburgh asked 600 white and 600 black participants if they supported the death penalty.  True to form, white support was around 65% while a slight majority of blacks stated their opposition.  The participants were then informed that some people oppose the death penalty because a disproportionate number of minorities are executed in America.  Following this simple statement, subjects were once again asked if they supported the death penalty.

Black support for the ultimate punishment dropped by twelve percentage points.  White support increased by twelve points.

This explains why Doug Evans, the man who will take Curtis Flowers to trial for an unprecedented sixth time next week, used all fifteen of his peremptory strikes on black residents back in 2004.  The Mississippi Supreme Court called it the most egregious case of racial bias they had ever seen . . . then handed the case back to Mr. Evans.  Under existing law, they had no choice.

The presence of a black defendant accused of raping or murdering a white victim naturally raises the issue of judicial fairness.  But instead of making white jurors more sensitive to the danger of racial bias, the fairness question (whether stated or merely implied) deepens racial animus in white jurors.

In the South, this heart-hardening effect is driven by civil rights resentment.  White Southerners have a well-publicized reputation for bigotry.  Remember the outcry when Neil Young (a Canadian smart-ass like me) released the song “Southern Man” in the late 1960s?: “I saw cotton and I saw black.  Tall white mansions and little shacks.  Southern Man when will you pay them back?  I heard screaming and bull whips cracking.  How long?  How long?”

Southern rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd scored an instant hit with “Sweet Home Alabama,” a song featuring the line: “I hope Neil Young will remember, a Southern Man don’t need him around anyhow.”  (Of course, the niftiest guitar hook in the history of popular music didn’t damage the song’s appeal.)  The spat wasn’t personal, but it emphasized the deep resentment any mention of the civil rights movement or Southern racism inspires in white folks.

Southern prosecutors aren’t necessarily racist, in the sense of hating black people; in some cases they are simply spinning a peculiar feature of American sociology to their advantage.  But what happens when a prosecutor is every bit as influenced by civil rights resentment as the white jurors he so cynically manipulates?

Take Doug Evans for example.  Before it became a social liability, Doug was a regular participant in meetings sponsored by a group of unapologetic white supremicists called the Council of Conservative Citizens.  Until the late 1990s, the CofCC was so representative of white mainstream opinion in Central Mississippi that involvement with the organization was a reputation-enhancer.

When you start with Mr. Evans’ historical affiliation with a racist organization, add the fact that the biggest backers of his quest for an all-white jury in the Flowers case are card carrying members of the CofCC, and throw in the prosecutor’s hard-earned reputation as Mississippi’s most racially biased district attorney, a clear, consistent (and, frankly, terrifying) picture emerges.

We should be grateful to the Council of Conservative Citizens for laying their opinions on the table.

The CofCC calls its magazine, The Citizens Informer, a title that hearkens back to the glory days when the Citizens’ Council movement controlled Mississippi politics and literal “informers” blanketed the Magnolia State.  The publication bills itself as “the voice of the no longer silent majority.”  Does the CofCC speak for the white mainstream in Mississippi?  If we’re talking about downtown Jackson and the ivy halls of Ole Miss, probably not.  If we’re talking about Winona, the jury (as they say) is still out.

Last week, the Citizens’ Informer published a nasty piece of work by Lawrence Auster, a leader of the paleo-conservative movement.   Auster was picking up on Rand Paul’s well-publicized difficulties with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Auster doesn’t like the Civil Rights Act and isn’t inclined to tap-dance around the issue like candidate Paul.

Auster doesn’t have a problem with equality under the law or equal rights as abstract concepts.  But when you grant black folks equal rights, he says, there is an expectation of equal outcomes.  Because black people, in Auster’s view, are morally and intellectually inferior to whites, there is no way of bridging the performance gap unless you trash the great standards on which the nation was founded.

Thus, Lawrence Auster is death on the Civil Rights Act:

“By attacking, in principle, all racial discrimination, including private racial discrimination, it in effect delegitimized all natural and historical human groupings and cultures, if they were white. It delegitimized white people’s most basic rights of free association and of property, since such rights were now seen as having only one end in view: the oppression of blacks. And, as pointed out above, it said that whites’ entire history as the American majority was a scandal. The ongoing functional and economic deficiencies in the black community were seen as the result of the same historic white sin, which thus seemed to be still operative in the present as well as the past.”

You can see how this applies to the criminal justice system. “The liberal equality of individuals under the law is part of the essence of America,” Auster admits.  “But it must not be America’s primary value. Liberal values–the belief in free inquiry, the treatment of all citizens according to the same rules–have an indispensable place in our heritage. But liberalism, the ideology that makes the pursuit of equality the most important thing, spells the death of our heritage.”

And here’s where Auster’s views (which are a highly articulate version of CofCC common sense) touch on the jury selection process.  “The fact that the law is procedurally neutral and race-blind, doesn’t mean that the conditions that allow for such a system to exist are race blind,” Auster insists. “Change America into a brown and black country, and that new population will not only not have much regard for that impersonal, non-tribal system of justice, because they themselves are tribal, but they will seek to overthrow that system of justice, along with all other historical aspects of America, because they were made by whites whom the nonwhites are now replacing. From which it follows that to maintain its universalist and impersonal system of justice, America must remain a particularist, predominantly white country.”

In an article on his own website, Auster leaves nothing to the imagination.  “Blacks are more ‘non-objective,'” he explains. “They understand things in a much more personal, subjective way than whites. They seem to have much less interest in knowledge or beauty for its own sake . . . Blacks feel they should not be held to moral standards for the crimes of blacks against whites, because blacks have been the victims of this vast and still unacknowledged evil by whites for several thousands of years. Blacks thus tend to see every issue in purely racialist terms.”

Is this the way Doug Evans thinks?  If so, it explains a great deal.

Evans behaves as if black jurors can’t be trusted.  When all five black jurors in the fourth Curtis Flowers trial voted to acquit, Evans never asked himself if these folks might be seeing something he was missing.  Black jurors don’t believe the eye witnesses Doug Evans trots before the jury just because these people are all black.  If black jurors in Montgomery County were convinced by Doug Evans’ case they would vote to convict.  They don’t want to return a dangerous man to free society–you know whose neighorhood he would move into.

Does Doug Evans think like Lawrence Auster and the rest of the unapologetic white supremacists in the Council of Conservative Citizens?  There is plenty of evidence suggesting he does and not the slightest indication that he does not.

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

A new study by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative deals with the problem of racial bias in jury selection.

Consider this:

According to an article in the New York Times, “EJI studied jury selection in eight states in the southern United States: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. State appellate courts in each of these states – except Tennessee, whose appellate courts have never granted Batson relief in a criminal case – have been forced to recognize continuing problems with racially biased jury selection. The Mississippi Supreme Court concluded in 2007 that ‘racially profiling jurors and racially motivated jury selection [are] still prevalent twenty years after Batson was handed down.'”

That quote came from the Mississippi Supreme Court’s 2007 finding that the third trial of Curtis Flowers was riddled with racial bias.  It is hardly surprising that a New York Times story highlighting the EJI’s new study begins and ends with the Flowers case.  The caption under the picture above reads, “Curtis Flowers at his capital trial in 2004. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed his first conviction after prosecutors used all of their peremptory strikes against blacks in the jury pool.”

Actually, it was his third conviction, but who’s counting.

The NYT article concludes with this:

In one Mississippi case, a black man, Curtis Flowers, was sentenced to death in 2004 for killing four furniture store employees. The jury was made up of 11 whites and one black after prosecutors used all 15 of their peremptory strikes on black jurors. Montgomery County, where the crime occurred, is 45 percent black. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the case, noting that “racially motivated jury selection is still prevalent 20 years after Batson.”

Although it didn’t make the New York Times, the Mississippi court introduced the meaty portion of its ruling with an expression of amazement: “The instant case presents us with as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge.”

Batson vs. Kentucky, you may recall, was the 1986 Supreme Court Decision banning the use of racial criteria in jury selection.  Unfortunately, so long as a prosecutor can give a race-neutral reason for making a strike (it doesn’t have to make sense) it is virtually impossible to sustain a Batson challenge.  Tennessee, for example, has never reversed a case because of racial bias in the jury selection process.

The Recommendations section of the EJI report is refreshingly candid.  Here are a few highlights, followed (in italics) with an application to the case of Curtis Flowers.

• “Dedicated and thorough enforcement of anti-discrimination laws designed to prevent racially biased jury selection must be undertaken by courts, judges, and lawyers involved in criminal and civil trials, especially in serious criminal cases and capital cases.”  Racial bias is particularly problematic in high-profile capital cases, especially when the state’s case is highly circumstantial.  Black jurors evaluating a case involving a black defendant are far more likely than white jurors to hold the State to its proper burden. 

• “Prosecutors who are found to have engaged in racially biased jury selection should be held accountable and should be disqualified from participation in the retrial of any person wrongly convicted as a result of discriminatory jury selection. Prosecutors who repeatedly exclude people of color from jury service should be subject to fines, penalties, suspension, and other consequences to deter this practice.”  When the Mississippi Supreme Court characterized DA Doug Evans’ behavior as the most egregious example of racial bias in the jury selection process they had ever witnessed there were no negative consequences.  Evans stayed on as prosecutor for trials four, five and (beginning next week) six.

• “States should provide remedies to people called for jury service who are illegally excluded on the basis of race, particularly jurors who are wrongly denigrated by state officials. States should implement strategies to disincentivize discriminatory conduct by state prosecutors and judges, who should enforce rather than violate anti-discrimination laws.”  The only disincentive in the Flowers case is to recuse both DA Doug Evans and Judge Joey Loper from the case.  The prosecution must be taken over by the Attorney General’s Office and a judge from outside the jurisdiction should be appointed.

• “Community groups, civil and human rights organizations, and concerned citizens should attend court proceedings and monitor the conduct of local officials with regard to jury selection practices in an effort to eliminate racially biased jury selection.”  Four members of the Friends of Justice board and supporters from across the nation have committed to being in Winona.  We will be paying close attention to the voir dire process and publishing our observations on this blog.

• “State and local justice systems should provide support and assistance to ensure that low-income residents, sole caregivers for children or other dependents, and others who are frequently excluded from jury service because of their economic, employment, or family status have an opportunity to serve.”  Most middle class people are compensated by their employers for jury service, but self-employed and minimum wage workers with no benefits are forced to shoulder the economic burden themselves.  As a result, minorities are far more likely to excuse themselves from the venire due to hardship.  This was one of the factors that allowed Doug Evans to seat eleven white jurors in a county that is 45% black. 

• “Greater racial diversity must be achieved within the judiciary, district attorney’s offices, the defense bar, and law enforcement to promote and strengthen the commitment to ensuring that all citizens have equal opportunities for jury service.”  The EJI study shows that only 4% of Mississippi district attorneys are black.  Winona’s black chief of police should have been responsible for investigating the Flowers case in 1996 but was pushed aside by the DA’s investigator John Johnson.  As a result, the same person was investigating and prosecuting the same case–a  recipe for prosecutorial tunnel vision.

This PDF version of the Curtis Flowers PowerPoint is the most effective summary of this disturbing case we have produced to date.  Please check it out and share promiscuously.