This brief summary of the Curtis Flowers case now introduces the extended version of the story on the Friends of Justice website. 

A brief introduction to the Curtis Flowers case

On the morning of July 16, 1996, four people were brutally murdered at a furniture store in the small Mississippi town of Winona.  By 11:00 am everybody had heard the news: Bertha Tardy, the proprietor of Tardy ‘s Furniture, had been killed execution style.  Carmen Rigby, Tardy’s longtime bookkeeper, had suffered the same fate, as had hired hands, Bobo Stewart and Robert Golden. Golden was black, the other three victims were white. Six months later, Curtis Flowers, a young black Winona resident who had worked three days for Bertha Tardy, was arrested and charged with the brutal murder of four innocent people.

Thirteen years, $300,000 and five trials later, Mr. Flowers remains behind bars and the state has been unable to obtain a final conviction.

The first trial was held in Tupelo, MS in 1997 and the second trial was in Gulfport two years later.  District Attorney Doug Evans was determined to convict Curtis Flowers four times: once for each cold-hearted murder.  It was a risky strategy.  To pull it off, Evans had to limit the evidence in each trial to a single victim and that was a virtual impossibility.  Evans won guilty verdicts and death sentences in Tupelo and Gulfport, but both trials were overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court.

In February of 2004, Curtis Flowers was found guilty, yet again, on four murder counts.  The trial was held in Winona, the county seat of Montgomery County.  The Winona Times ran a special edition featuring a large head shot of Flowers beside graphic pictures from the murder scene. Victims were shown lying in their own blood. Several residents were outraged by the pictorial spread and wrote angry letters to publisher, Dale Gerstenlager. Gerstenlager responded that, apart from the photographs, readers couldn’t appreciate what a terrible deed Flowers had done.

The verdict would not stand.  According to former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz, “We reversed because the jury selection process ended up not being fair. Every challenge the state had was used against African Americans and the only African American that was seated was when the state ran out of challenges and could not challenge anymore and one was seated.”

Doug Evans knew he would have a hard time getting a conviction in Winona if even a single African American was seated on the jury.  In a county that is half black, a jury with eleven white jurors couldn’t be produced legally, so Evans broke the law. 

It was an act of desperation.  In Winona’s white community, Flowers’ guilt is a no-brainer–as obvious as the sun in a clear blue sky. 

Black jurors have been much harder to convince.

The case against Flowers is circumstantial.  He can’t produce a convincing alibi for his activities the morning of the murders.  A gunshot residue test taken three hours after the murders found a single micron of residue on the web of his right thumb.  But the real clincher was the bloody footprint found at the scene of the crime.  Tests prove it was made by a size 10.5 Grant Hill Fila tennis shoe, and a box for precisely that shoe was found in the dresser drawer of the girlfriend Flower’s was living with.  Granted, there were no shoes in the box (it was filled with hair ribbons), but the shoe box in the dresser has been the heart of the state’s case.

Doug Evans had the shoe box evidence nailed down within a few weeks of the murders, but Flowers wasn’t arrested until January of 1997, half a year later.  In the interim, Evans and his invgestigator, John Johnson, cobbled together a list of witnesses who could trace Flowers’ movements on that fatal morning.

The state’s theory of the crime is relatively simple.  Curtis Flowers was angry because Bertha Flowers wanted to deduct $400 worth of damaged batteries from his paycheck.  Set on revenge, Flowers rose early on the morning of the crime and walked to the Angelica garment factory, five-to-ten minutes from his home.  There, shortly after 7:00 am, Flowers stole a handgun from the car of his uncle, Doyle Simpson.  Flowers returned home for a brief period.  Then, just after 9:00 am, he walked to the Tardy’s furniture store, killed four people in cold blood, stole $400 from the cash register, ditched the gun, ran home, disposed of his clothes and the Grant Hill Filas he was wearing and stuck the $400 in the headboard of his girlfriend’s bed.

It took six months to find witnesses who could place Flowers at the Angelica factory and along the various routes the state believed he traveled on the day of the crime.

On the surface, this looks like an airtight case, and it has generally been reported as such (to the extent it has been reported at all).  But at Flowers’ fourth trial in December of 2007, all five black jurors voted to acquit while all seven white jurors voted to convict.

A frustrated Doug Evans returned to the Montgomery County courthouse in Winona less than a year later for the fifth trial.  Three black jurors were selected, but they were all solidly middle class and well-connected to the white community.  Two of the black jurors were willing to trade a guilty verdict for a life sentence.  But James Bibbs, a retired Winona school teacher, hung the jury.  Judge Joey Loper embodied the outrage of Winona’s white community.  He had Bibbs dragged into the courtroom.  Loper told the recalitrant juror that he had lied to get on the jury and demanded that DA Evans file perjury charges.  Loper then insisted that Evans lobby other Mississippi prosecutors in support of a law that would allow the state to file motions for a change of venue (something only defense attorneys could do). 

A bill giving prosecutors the right to call a jury from a multi-county district in cases that went to trial three times without a final conviction was supported by state senator Lydia Chassaniol and state representative Bobby Howell.  The bill was introduced in the 2009 legislative session and sailed through the Senate without serious opposition.  In the House, however, it was killed in committee by the African American chairman of the house judiciary committee.

The same bill is currently being debated in the Mississippi Legislature.

Meanwhile, Judge Loper and DA Evans were forced to recuse themselves from the case against James Bibbs.  The Mississippi Attorney General’s took over the case and promptly dropped the charges due to a lack of evidence. 

A sixth trial is scheduled for June 7, 2010.  This time, the world will be watching.

Doyle Simpson and his 380 automatic

The gun that ended the lives of Bertha Tardy, Carmen Rigby, Bobo Stewart and Robert Golden belonged to Doyle Simpson.  All are agreed on that point.  Simpson made two visits to his car on the morning of the crime and reported that his gun had been stolen from a locked glove compartment shortly before the crime was committed.  Catherine Snow, one of Simpson’s co-workers, claims she saw Curtis Flowers leaning against Simpson’s car at 7:30 that morning.

But is Doyle Simpson credible under oath?  When first interviewed, he told investigators that he bought the weapon from his brother Robert.  When that story fell apart, Simpson testified that he bought the gun from a friend named “Ike”.  Simpson calls Ike a good friend but doesn’t know his last name.

The murder weapon belonged to Doyle Simpson–that much seems clear.  But was the gun in the glove compartment of Simpson’s car the morning of the murders? 

Doyle Simpson is no stranger to the streets.  He has used drugs and has probably been involved in the drug trade.  Back in the day, Simpson’s throat was slit and his body was unceremoniously deposited in a tree outside New Orleans.  Miraculously, the Winona hustler survived.  But whoever tried to kill him had no regard for human life and dignity.  Much like the person who pulled the trigger five times in the Tardy Furniture Store.

On the witness stand, Doyle Simpson has the demeanor of a scared rabbit.  Did he make his gun available to some very bad people who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse?  In the most recent trial, in September, 2008, Simpson made an interesting slip.  Asked to specify when he put the gun in his car, Simpson replied, “The day before they stole it.”

Who, we are left to wonder, are “they”.

More to say on this later.  Stay tuned.

Is there a link between Neo-Nazis, Birthers, Tea Party enthusiasts and mainstream conservatism?  The producers of this video think there is. 

White Power USA was produced for Al-Jazeera English by American journalists drawing on the same sources you would expect to see in the mainstream press.  Except, for some reason, the MSM hasn’t shown much interest in the racist roots of the Tea Party crowd. 

The White Power leaders depicted in this documentary are desperate for media attention.  Although groups displaying the swastika and the stars-n-bars are enjoying rapid membership growth, most extremists have learned to mainstream the message.

The producers of “White Power USA” aren’t suggesting that everyone involved in America’s most dynamic populist movement is racist.  But can mainstream Christian conservatives attend Tea Party events without noticing the overtly racist symbols and sentiments on display?

Those following my posts on the Curtis Flowers case will be particularly interested in the extended interview with Council of Conservative Citizens co-founder Gordon Baum.  Members of a CCC chapter in northern Mississippi also get a few minutes of camera time.  If we’re known by the company we keep, Senator Lydia Chassaniol needs to find better company. 

In this post-9-11 world, some won’t be interested in viewing a  documentary associated with Al Jazeera, and that’s okay.  On the other hand, this may be the perfect time to heed the gentle call of Wee Robbie Burns: “O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.”

 Congress, finally, has turned its attention to mortgage fraud.  According to the New York Times, The F.B.I. is presently investigating more than 2,800 mortgage fraud cases, almost five times the 534 inquiries in 2004. Attorney General, Eric Holder, feels the current efforts to fight financial crime will foster confidence in the system. 

But merely increasing the number of prosecutions isn’t enough–the feds must address the quality of their mortgage fraud cases.  According to the Times, “Of the 2,800 mortgage fraud investigations under way at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, most — 1,842 — were classified as major cases, which meant they involved more than $1 million in losses.” 

Guess how much money was lost in the five real estate deals at the center of the Alvin Clay prosecution?  When all five properties had been re-sold, the total loss to buyers, sellers and the financial system was $16,000.  

 That’s it. 

This doesn’t mean that the Donny McCuien and Ray Nealy, the two men at the heart of the Little Rock scam, weren’t worthy candidates for prosecution.  They were.  But small-time hustlers like McCuien and Nealy were always incidental to the FBI.  They G-men were after an attorney and real estate broker named Alvin Clay.  

Nealy and McCuien turned to real estate fraud because government oversight was virtually non-existent.  Banks were willing to make “stated” loans and the con artists came running.  In a stated loan, a financial institution agrees to believe that a prospective buyer possesses the assets indicated in a loan application.   Call it the honor system.  This extreme degree of credulity was driven by a desire to make as many loans as possible, a dynamic fueled by greedy managers and corporate executives hell-bent on maximizing bonuses.  Nobody was paying attention–it was bad for business. 

The financial institutions involved in the McCuien-Nealy scam were begging to be exploited.  Alvin Clay made the same mistake the banks and trust companies were making–he took McCuien and Nealy at their word.  

On the sixth day of Alvin Clay’s trial, I said that t federal government was avoiding embarrassing questions because it didn’t have any good answers. 

•Why has the government hitched its wagon to a man who lies when the truth would sound better?

•Why has the government spent five years and a million dollars pursuing an innocent man?

•Why did the government initiate an investigation of Alvin Clay before they had any evidence of wrongdoing?

•Why has the government used the threat of pain and the promise of relief to suborn perjury from its star witness?

•Why did FBI agent Rodney Hayes lie to a judge to get a search warrant and perjure himself before a grand jury to get an indictment?

•When the Eastern District of the US Attorney’s Office was forced to recuse itself from this case; why did the Western District pick it up?

The answer to most of these questions is the same: the federal government, represented by Assistant US Attorney Bob Govar, noticed that a combative defense attorney named Alvin Clay was involved in a series of real estate deals and decided to look into it.  There was no initial evidence of wrongdoing; FBI agent Rodney Hayes was sent on a fishing expedition.  The goal was to nail Clay, an attorney with a longstanding adversarial relationship with Govar.  The ambitious Hayes understood the nature of the game.

It never occurred to the feds that the McCuien-Nealy scam was driven by systemic regulatory gaps, or that financial industry was willing to tolerate a high degree of corruption if it increased the overall level of activity.  The real crime was staring the FBI in the face; but they were so intent on busting a single black attorney they couldn’t see the obvious.

Hopefully we have all learned something from the mortgage fiasco.  The Clay case demonstrates how much there is to learn.

Everybody knows what Harry said.  Barack Obama had a good shot at the presidency because he was “light skinned” and spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”. 

Reid and Obama both concede the words were poorly chosen.  But are we dealing with racism?

Republican politicians think so.  Or rather, they feel that if the senior Democrat in the Senate gets a pass on this one, America should apologize to Trent Lott.

No one on either side of this dust-up is suggesting that Reid’s observations were factually inaccurate.  True or not, it is suggested, the remarks was indelicate and insensitive.

To whom?

African Americans, for the most part, don’t seem to mind.  Reid was merely stating the obvious–some white Americans are more comfortable with people of color so long as they don’t have too much color.

Morever, middle class African American parents stress to their children that a mastery of standard English (the way folks talk on the evening news) is a prerequisite to a good job. 

Whites from the rural South face a similar challenge, although to a smaller extent.

If Harry Reid thinks it’s okay for white voters to prefer light-skinned black candidates who could pass for white over the telephone, I’ve got a problem with that.  It isn’t okay.  Lyndon Johnson didn’t need to transcend his Texas dialect to get elected.  In fact, his “Muh fella Amuricans” was reassuring to a lot of people.  So why should a black candidate have to sound white to get elected?

On the other hand, if Reid was merely admitting the regrettable fact that many potential African American candidates look and sound too black to make it to the White House I defy anyone to argue.  Whether he should have said what he said is another matter.  If he had slipped in a few qualifiers like “unfortunately” or “I wish it were otherwise, but . . .” no one would have taken offense.

Of course, the word “Negro” suggests that Mr. Reid is every bit as old as his pictures suggest.  The use of the old n-word is more likely to offend young African Americans who didn’t grow up hearing it and have never used it themselves.

According to the Telegraph (a British paper), the book “Game Change”, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, “alleges that when efforts to persuade the late Edward Kennedy to endorse his wife’s presidential bid fell flat when the former president reportedly told his old friend that just a few years ago Mr Obama would have been serving them coffee.”

Yuck!  No wonder Kennedy threw his weight behind Obama!

Clinton’s “coffee” remark suggests that because African Americans were once relegated to servile jobs, Barack Obama is an uppity Negro who wants too much too fast.  If Reid shared that perception he would deserve the negative press he is getting.  But the Senate majority leader was clearly excited about Obama’s candidacy.

I suspect Mr. Clinton would have shared Mr. Reid’s enthusiasm for Barack Obama if Hillary Clinton hadn’t been in the primary race.  Politics makes strange bed fellows and strains long-established friendships.  If Bill had no horse in the presidential race (and no, I am not calling Hillary Clinton a horse) I suspect he would have been thrilled that his party had a strong candidate. 

On the other hand, opinions we don’t dare acknowledge, even to ourselves, can slip out when we’re hurt or angry. 

I am too concerned about the millions of white Americans (most of them over fifty) who are unprepared for an African American president to worry about folks who artlessly rejoice in the upward trajectory of a black politician.  Had Reid been forty years younger, the right words would have sprung naturally to his lips. 

Trent Lott addressed a meeting of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens and explicitly endorsed their views.  Lott wished that segregationist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond had been elected in 1948.  Lott was raised to believe in the goodness of segregation and no one in the social and political circles he moves in has ever suggested he change his mind.  If that’s the way Mr. Lott thinks he might as well shout it to the world.  But don’t expect the rest of us to give him a pass.

Like Trent Lott, Harry Reid is the product of a racist era.  The difference is that Reid knows the old ways were wrong, even if his off-the-cuff remarks suggest he hasn’t outgrown his roots as much as we, or he, might like.

Law professor, Stanley Fish thinks the law is more concerned with right answers than with true answers.   

To illustrate, Dr. Fish tells the story of Leonel Torres Herrera. 

“Found guilty of murder, (Herrera) claimed that because new evidence proving his innocence had emerged his case should be reconsidered. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority, replied that innocence or guilt was not a question for his court to consider absent a demonstration that the original trial was infected by error. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in a concurring opinion, agreed. Petitioner, she said, does not appear before us an “innocent man,” but as a “legally guilty person” who is not “entitled to get another judicial hearing” given his failure to demonstrate that the trial he received was unfair. The trial was fair, and the question of his guilt has been determined in a constitutionally correct procedure. That procedure provides the right (if not the true) answer to the question, “was he guilty?” (Herrera was later executed.)

In the picture above, Ms. O’Conner mourns the passing of her old pal, Bill Rehnquist.  I doubt she shed a tear, or even noticed, when Mr. Herrera breathed his last.

Fish is right.  The legal system is so fixated on correct procedure that the truth pften runs a poor second.  The prosecution in the Curtis Flowers case has been reversed three times, but it wasn’t because DA Doug Evans’ case against Flowers is a jumble of circumstantial evidence and wild conjecture held together with perjured testimony.  If Mr. Evans hadn’t been guilty of blatant prosecutorial misconduct, Curtis Flowers would no longer be in the land of the living. 

 Leonel Torres Herrera died without getting a chance to present credible evidence of actual innocence in open court. 

Fortunately, Troy Davis will get to tell his story. 

The criminal justice system can value the true answer over the merely right answer if it so chooses.  But if judges decide the rules were followed during the original trial, the fact that the truth was given short shrift can be ignored as irrelevant.  From a legal standpoint, once a defendant has been found guilty at the conclusion of an error-free trial, he is guilty and should be treated as such.

Troy Davis has faired better than Mr. Herrera because the public has lost confidence in legal system’s ability to establish the truth.

Hear the word “Baptist” and what words spring to mind: narrow, fundamentalist, bigoted, judgmental, moralistic? But Baptists, like every other religious group, represent a complex configuration of all things human.  Traditionally, Baptists have been America’s greatest defenders of religious liberty (yes, really) and, in theory at least, Baptist preachers are unrestrained by dogma or denominational hierarchy and are thus free to speak from conscience. 

Occasionally, we exercise that right.

As Bob Allen points out in an excellent article for the Associated Baptist Press, Americans–Baptists included–are gradually becoming disenchanted with the death penalty.  The Baptist Standard, the voice of Texas Baptists, picked up Allen’s article, which should tell you something.  True, they didn’t print the excellent chart showing that the southern states accounted for 87% of American executions in 2009 and 95% in 2008, and that Texas, as always, leads the parade.  But you’ve got to cut these guys a little slack–they’re writing for Baptists in Texas.

Baptists are associated with punitive policies because the hardline traditionalists in our ranks have done an excellent job of marketing their views.  Still, it is very difficult to make a consistent theological case for the death penalty or mass incarceration from the Bible.  Proof texts can be found for any position, but the overwhelming thrust of both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is in the direction of mercy, compassion and restoration.  Unfortunately, those of us who take the Bible straight have done a lousy job of getting the word out. 

Although Bob Allen doesn’t realize it, he is the first mainstream reporter in America (outside Mississippi) to publicize the case of Curtis Flowers.  Tom Mangold did an excellent report for BBC Radio, and I have spoken to several reporters who intend to do something with the Flowers story in the near future–but Allen is the first to mention Flowers by name, albeit in connection with the widely reported Troy Davis story.  Here’s the relevant portion of the article:

In August the federal Supreme Court ordered a hearing to receive testimony about whether new evidence establishes the innocence of Troy Davis, an African-American man on death row for the 1991 murder of a white police officer in Savannah, Ga.

Seven of nine witnesses who testified they saw Davis shoot and kill Officer Mark Allen McPhail later recanted, saying police pressured them into falsely fingering Davis. One of two witnesses who did not recant allegedly told family and friends that he is the actual murderer.

Supporters of the fallen officer say Davis was convicted on physical evidence and should be executed in the name of justice. But Alan Bean, an ordained American Baptist minister who runs a criminal-justice-reform organization called Friends of Justice, said manipulation of eyewitness testimony is a problem in the court system nationwide.

“Not only do police officers and investigators coerce ‘eyewitnesses’ into cooperating with the government’s theory of the case,” said Bean, a white man who helped bring national attention to a noose-hanging incident that revealed racial tensions in Jena, La. “There is growing evidence that even sincere and well-intentioned eyewitness testimony is far less reliable than is generally believed.”

Bean started Friends of Justice in response to an infamous drug sting in Tulia, Texas, in 1999, in which more than half of the town’s black male residents were arrested and convicted on the questionable testimony of a single undercover officer. Bean said he is monitoring the Troy Davis case because of its similarity to one involving Curtis Flowers, a black man behind bars for the 1996 execution-style slaying of four people in Winona, Miss., who has been tried five times without a final conviction by the state.

I saw this story about CA governor Arnold Schwarzenegger calling for a “Schools not Prisons” politics on the NYT site and thought it warranted a post.  Unfortunately, I’m cramming for Saturday’s Friends of Justice Board meeting and a Sunday preaching opportunity and don’t have time for reflection.  Fortunately, Baylor law professor Mark Osler has addressed the issues over at Osler’s Razor and raises some provocative issues.

Political Mayhem Thursday: Schools or Prisons?

Lame-duck California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger is supporting a Constitutional amendment in that state which would require that the state spend more money every year on universities than it does on prisons.

I think it is an intriguing idea.

First, though, we have to acknowledge that incarcerating a lot of people is probably going to reduce crime, even if we just incarcerate people at random– there simply will be fewer people on the street to commit crimes. Incarcerating a large part of the population does reduce crime.

However, incarcerating a lot of people is an expensive way to achieve what may be a minor result. The better we target the people who really create crime– the key men– the more efficient the system and the fewer people we need to incarcerate to obtain a given result. Of course, for this to happen, we must acknowledge one over-riding goal in criminal justice: To incapacitate the key men. It would be unusual to find that kind of political discipline.

Still, I would love it if we could try, and as a result give more money to universities than we do to prisons.

What do you think?

-Mark Osler

Larry James is president and CEO of Central Dallas Ministries.  This brief post on the link between poverty and hopelessness is one of the best things I’ve read in a long while.

Hopelessness vs. Laziness

It occurred to me recently that middleclass and upperclass folks who accuse underclass folks of being lazy don’t really understand life in the ghetto.

When you have little or no hope of landing the kind of job that would allow you, literally, to work your way out of poverty and all of its deadends, a paralysis of hopelessness can set in. When it does, lots of people simply come to a halt. It is as if a wall emerges from the ground in the pathway and the parade of a person’s life simply stops.

Hopelessness may lead to a series of odd jobs; you know, hit and miss kind of work that pays a wage, but not one that’s liveable or progressive.

For lots of people the deadends of life signal an end to effort.

“What’s the use?” can become the fundamental question of life. And, until that question finds a reasonable answer, life is going nowhere.

So, the next time you think “lazy,” stop and reconsider.

Ask some questions.

-Larry James