This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
First, a quick note about impeachment: More than 600 protests will be taking place around the country this evening. The goal is to voice outrage at President Trump’s behavior and show support for impeaching him. My colleague Michelle Goldberg writes about the planned events in her column: “In this moment, when the political valence of impeachment is still unclear, and the fight for a thorough, transparent trial in the Senate is just beginning, citizens can make a real difference by gathering en masse and voicing their outrage.”
Justice delayed
There was no physical evidence — no gun, no fingerprints, no DNA — that suggested Curtis Flowers killed four people in a Mississippi furniture store in 1996. There was also no cohesive story that suggested he did, as I wrote last year.
Yet Flowers spent the last 23 years behind bars for the crime.
Yesterday, he finally walked out of jail.
He still isn’t a free man, because the same prosecutor who put Flowers in jail could still choose to retry him. But after the Supreme Court vacated his conviction in June, citing the prosecutor’s blocking of black jurors, a Mississippi judge yesterday set bail at $250,000. An anonymous donor posted enough money for Flowers to be set free.
His release is a triumph of justice. It’s also an example of the power of great journalism; a team of American Public Media reporters, including Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark, uncovered multiple holes in the case and laid them out in a fantastic podcast.
But of course the Flowers case is still largely a triumph of injustice. Curtis Flowers, who’s 49, has spent almost all of his adult life in jail. Doug Evans, a Mississippi district attorney, has tried Flowers six different times, repeatedly going back to court after initial convictions were thrown out on appeal because of Evans’s misconduct. And Evans hasn’t yet given up.
“It’s been a remarkable day,” Baran told me in an email, “and now the big question is — Does the state go forward with a seventh trial?”
I’m reminded of an Op-Ed that Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project wrote for The Times last year. “Most prosecutors are hard-working public servants and committed to fair play,” she wrote. “But those who break the law and face no consequence are a stain on their colleagues — and the legal profession.”
As Morrison explained, a lack of consequences is the norm for lawbreaking prosecutors:
The National Registry of Exonerations, based out of the University of California, Irvine, reports that “official misconduct” — by police, prosecutors or both — was a factor in roughly half of the nearly 2,200 exonerations across the country since 1989. …
It doesn’t have to be this way. Rather than tolerate a bar “discipline” process that is marred by lengthy delays, operates in secrecy, and too often results in little to no consequences for even serious misconduct, legislators should create commissions to regulate prosecutors’ conduct and law licenses, with greater accountability and transparency.
For more …
Kristen Clarke, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law: “Flowers’ incarceration is a reminder about the ways in which racism continues to infect the criminal justice system, including jury selection.”
Kira Lerner of The Appeal, writing last month about a proposed class-action lawsuit against Evans: “The lawsuit, filed by attorneys with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, claims that since Evans became lead prosecutor for Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit Court District in 1992, he and his assistants have struck prospective Black jurors 4.4 times more frequently than white jurors, ‘a rate that is unparalleled in any available study.’”
If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Justice for Curtis Flowers
Opinion | Justice for Curtis Flowers
This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
First, a quick note about impeachment: More than 600 protests will be taking place around the country this evening. The goal is to voice outrage at President Trump’s behavior and show support for impeaching him. My colleague Michelle Goldberg writes about the planned events in her column: “In this moment, when the political valence of impeachment is still unclear, and the fight for a thorough, transparent trial in the Senate is just beginning, citizens can make a real difference by gathering en masse and voicing their outrage.”
Justice delayed
There was no physical evidence — no gun, no fingerprints, no DNA — that suggested Curtis Flowers killed four people in a Mississippi furniture store in 1996. There was also no cohesive story that suggested he did, as I wrote last year.
Yet Flowers spent the last 23 years behind bars for the crime.
Yesterday, he finally walked out of jail.
He still isn’t a free man, because the same prosecutor who put Flowers in jail could still choose to retry him. But after the Supreme Court vacated his conviction in June, citing the prosecutor’s blocking of black jurors, a Mississippi judge yesterday set bail at $250,000. An anonymous donor posted enough money for Flowers to be set free.
His release is a triumph of justice. It’s also an example of the power of great journalism; a team of American Public Media reporters, including Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark, uncovered multiple holes in the case and laid them out in a fantastic podcast.
But of course the Flowers case is still largely a triumph of injustice. Curtis Flowers, who’s 49, has spent almost all of his adult life in jail. Doug Evans, a Mississippi district attorney, has tried Flowers six different times, repeatedly going back to court after initial convictions were thrown out on appeal because of Evans’s misconduct. And Evans hasn’t yet given up.
“It’s been a remarkable day,” Baran told me in an email, “and now the big question is — Does the state go forward with a seventh trial?”
I’m reminded of an Op-Ed that Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project wrote for The Times last year. “Most prosecutors are hard-working public servants and committed to fair play,” she wrote. “But those who break the law and face no consequence are a stain on their colleagues — and the legal profession.”
As Morrison explained, a lack of consequences is the norm for lawbreaking prosecutors:
The National Registry of Exonerations, based out of the University of California, Irvine, reports that “official misconduct” — by police, prosecutors or both — was a factor in roughly half of the nearly 2,200 exonerations across the country since 1989. …
It doesn’t have to be this way. Rather than tolerate a bar “discipline” process that is marred by lengthy delays, operates in secrecy, and too often results in little to no consequences for even serious misconduct, legislators should create commissions to regulate prosecutors’ conduct and law licenses, with greater accountability and transparency.
For more …
Kristen Clarke, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law: “Flowers’ incarceration is a reminder about the ways in which racism continues to infect the criminal justice system, including jury selection.”
Kira Lerner of The Appeal, writing last month about a proposed class-action lawsuit against Evans: “The lawsuit, filed by attorneys with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, claims that since Evans became lead prosecutor for Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit Court District in 1992, he and his assistants have struck prospective Black jurors 4.4 times more frequently than white jurors, ‘a rate that is unparalleled in any available study.’”
If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article