[Ppnews] The Persecution of Curtis Flowers

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/allen03172010.html

March 17, 2010


An Interview with Dr. Alan Bean


The Persecution of Curtis Flowers

By JOE ALLEN

DR. ALAN Bean is the executive director of 
Friends of Justice, a nonprofit organization that 
works to uphold due process in the criminal 
justice system. It was formed in response to the 
infamous Tulia, Texas, drug sting of 1999, in 
which forty-seven people, thirty-nine of them 
African Americans, were rounded up based on the 
false testimony of a corrupt and racist 
undercover agent. Bean, a local Baptist minister, 
played a key role in organizing to expose the 
Tulia travesty and working to free the 
defendants. The Texas legislature, in response to 
the work of the Friends of Justice, passed the 
Tulia Corroboration Bill, which has led to the 
exoneration of dozens of innocent people by 
raising the evidentiary standards for undercover testimony.

Learning from this victory, Friends of Justice 
established Operation Blind Justice, organizing 
in affected communities across Texas, Louisiana, 
Arkansas, and Mississippi to restore due process 
protections to poor people of color. Bean and 
Friends of Justice played an instrumental role in 
publicizing the Jena 6 case, where six 
African-American high school students faced long 
prison terms after a fight with white students 
following the hanging of nooses on campus to 
intimidate Black students. Over 30,000 people 
marched in Jena, Louisiana, in September 2007 to 
protest the prosecution of the Jena 6. The 
charges against five of them were expunged from their records.

Recently, Friends of Justice has turned its 
attention to Winona, Mississippi­ a town not far 
from Philadelphia, where three civil rights 
workers were murdered in the early 1960s. There, 
Curtis Flowers faces his sixth trial for the same 
murder charge. So far, the case has received more 
attention in Great Britain than it has in the 
American press. A primer on the Curtis Flowers 
case can be found at the Friends of Justice Web 
site. See also an interview with Bean on the Jena 
6 case in ISR issue 55, November–December 2007.

TELL US about the case of Curtis Flowers and its historical significance.

WHEN CURTIS Flowers goes to trial in June of this 
year, he will become the first man in U.S. 
history to be tried six times on the same murder 
charges. In July of 1996, four people were shot 
to death in a furniture store in Winona, 
Mississippi. Curtis Flowers, a young 
African-American Winona resident, had worked for 
the furniture store for three days and two weeks 
before the murders. When a check in his name was 
discovered on the desk of the murdered 
proprietor, Bertha Tardy, Flowers became the prime suspect.
Because nothing apart from the check on Ms. 
Tardy’s desk connected Curtis to the crime, it 
took District Attorney Doug Evans over half a 
year to build a case. It appeared certain that 
the murder weapon belonged to Doyle Simpson, a 
part-time janitor at a local garment factory. 
Simpson reported that the weapon had been stolen 
from his car the morning of the murders. 
According to the state’s theory of the crime, 
Curtis Flowers walked from his home to the 
parking lot of the garment factory, stole 
Simpson’s handgun, and walked home. An hour 
later, he walked to the furniture store, killed 
four people, and walked back to his home. 
Investigators spent six months walking the route 
Flowers allegedly followed, offering a $30,000 
reward to anyone who remembered seeing Curtis 
Flowers passing by their home on the fateful 
morning. It took several months before any 
witnesses provided information to the police, and 
some didn’t cooperate with the investigation 
until half a year after the murders.

The first two trials were held outside Winona and 
Montgomery County. Flowers was convicted and 
sentenced to death on both occasions, but the 
verdicts were vacated by the Mississippi Supreme 
Court due to prosecutorial misconduct. The third 
trial took place in Winona, and once again 
Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death, but 
the Supreme Court ruled that the prosecutor 
illegally prevented African-American residents from serving on the jury.

The fourth trial was held in Winona in December 
of 2007. This time a chastened Doug Evans made no 
effort to restrict jury service to white 
residents and a jury of five African-Americans 
and seven whites was selected. The jury split 
along racial lines; all five Black jurors voted 
to acquit; all seven white jurors voted to convict.

The tension in Winona is so extreme that when a 
Black juror voted to acquit at the conclusion of 
the fifth trial in 2008, Judge Joseph Loper told 
DA Evans to charge the man with perjury. 
Eventually, both the judge and the prosecutor 
were recused from the case and the Mississippi 
attorney general’s office quietly dismissed the charges.

Friends of Justice agreed to get involved in the 
Flowers case because it fits an all-too-familiar 
pattern of testimony shaping and witness 
manipulation. The recent rash of DNA-based 
exonerations have revealed that wrongful 
conviction is a much worse problem than most 
people realize, that faulty witness 
identification is the chief culprit, and that 
people of color have been disproportionately 
impacted. The Flowers case is the perfect poster child for this problem.

WHY HAVE Mississippi prosecutors staked so much on this case?

THE TARDY murders (as they are now called) 
presented District Attorney Doug Evans with every 
prosecutor’s worst nightmare: a particularly 
heinous murder involving socially prominent 
victims and very little real evidence. Since the 
name of Curtis Flowers had been associated with 
the case from the beginning, Evans had no choice 
but to make the best case he could. If the 
prosecutor didn’t have evidence connecting 
Flowers to the crime, evidence had to be found.

It is commonly assumed that African-American 
jurors take Flowers’ side in this case out of a 
perverse desire to protect one of their own. The 
truth is much more complicated than that. 
African-American residents of Winona and 
Montgomery County know Curtis Flowers as the lead 
singer in a popular gospel quartet that performs 
regularly in local churches. Whoever pulled the 
trigger four times in the Tardy furniture store 
in 1996 was a cold-blooded killer, a person 
devoid of conscience. Those who know Curtis best 
believe he is incapable of committing such a 
crime under any circumstances. In addition, many 
African-American residents question the 
credibility of the witnesses in the Flowers case. 
White residents in this racially divided 
community have no personal experience with Curtis 
Flowers or the largely African-American witnesses 
who originally agreed to testify in anticipation 
of a $30,000 payoff, and are therefore willing to accept the state’s narrative.

Defense counsel wants to keep holding trials in 
Winona. They doubt they can win a clear 
acquittal, but so long as they can place one 
African-American juror in the jury box they have 
a good shot at a hung jury. Frustrated by this 
strategy, DA Evans has shaped legislation that 
would allow the prosecution in cases that have 
gone to trial at least three times, to select a 
jury from a five-county region. This would make 
it possible to seat a jury in which no one is 
even slightly acquainted with the Flowers family. 
The “Flowers Bill” has been championed by State 
Senator Lydia Chassaniol, a proud member of the 
overtly racist Council of Conservative Citizens. 
The legislation was approved by the Senate in 
2009, but in the House, the bill was killed in 
committee by an African-American committee 
chairman. Senator Chassaniol is currently making 
a second attempt to get her Flowers bill passed.

When Curtis Flowers goes to trial in June, the 
situation in Winona will be unspeakably tense.

CAN YOU tell us about the civil rights record of 
the region where the Flowers case is taking place?

IN THE summer of 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer and 
several other civil rights activists were 
brutally beaten in the Montgomery County jail. 
The group was returning from a training session 
in nonviolent resistance and had exited the bus 
in Winona to use the restroom and grab a quick 
meal. Emboldened by their training, the 
African-American activists asked to be served at 
the all-white restaurant. They were immediately 
arrested, stuffed into police cars and booked 
into the local jail. Hamer was beaten with a 
blackjack by two African-American inmates under 
the supervision of Sheriff Earl Patridge, his 
deputies, and a Mississippi state trooper. The 
assault left Ms. Hamer half dead and she never fully recovered.

Most of the men and women associated with the 
Flowers prosecution (Judge Joseph Loper, District 
Attorney Doug Evans, investigator John Johnson, 
and Senator Lydia Chassaniol) were in junior high 
school when Fannie Lou Hamer and her friends were 
assaulted. In 1963, African Americans in 
Mississippi had no civil rights and no due 
process protections. Mississippi has seen a great 
deal of positive change since 1963, but not as 
much as most people think. Fannie Lou Hamer 
mesmerized the 1964 Democratic Convention in 
Atlantic City by recounting her experience in 
Winona. But Mississippi Democrats voted en masse 
for archconservative Republican Barry Goldwater.

In the Mississippi Delta, the struggle for civil 
rights was uniquely brutal and ultimately 
inconclusive. Neo-Confederate nostalgia and civil 
rights resentment are both strong in the rural 
regions of Mississippi, which explains why a 
politician like Lydia Chassaniol can openly 
embrace the Council of Conservative Citizens (a 
resurgence of the old White Citizens’ Councils) 
without raising eyebrows or paying a political 
price. In Montgomery County, this kind of talk 
wins elections. The prosecution of Curtis Flowers 
suggests that neo-Confederate nostalgia and civil 
rights resentment influence the criminal justice 
system as much as they shape the political 
landscape. Mississippi’s progress is most evident 
in urban areas like Jackson and educational 
enclaves like Oxford (the home of Ole Miss), but 
the continued influence of Old South values is 
still on display in the rural sections of the 
state. The relatively progressive rulings of the 
Mississippi Supreme Court are in sharp contrast 
to the legal realities in the Montgomery County Courthouse.

WHERE IS the case likely to go from here?

WHEN THE sixth trial begins in June, Winona 
residents on both sides of the racial divide will 
experience the same collective agony. For family 
and friends of the four murder victims, the 
repetition of gruesome details will rip open 
wounds that have never been allowed to heal. 
White Winona residents, with very few exceptions, 
will be praying for a unanimous guilty verdict 
that satisfies the state Supreme Court. 
Supporters of Curtis Flowers will be praying for 
another hung jury. The state will present 
essentially the same case it has laid out in five 
previous trials. Thirteen years have passed since 
the case was first tried in 1997 and several key 
witnesses are no longer living. The state’s 
witnesses know that if they recant their earlier 
testimony they will be charged with perjury. Both 
sides are steeling themselves for another 
near-miss for the prosecution and a continuation 
of an agonizing legal melodrama.

The Flowers bill currently being debated in the 
Mississippi Senate will probably pass, while the 
House version of the bill will likely be killed 
in committee once again. Even if the legislation 
is signed into law, it will almost certainly be 
declared unconstitutional because it violates a 
defendant’s right to a jury of his or her peers.

Friends of Justice is trying to break this 
judicial logjam by placing the Flowers story in 
its proper historical context. Until recently, 
the case had attracted little attention outside 
Mississippi but that is gradually changing. In 
December 2010, the British Broadcasting 
Corporation (BBC) aired a radio documentary on 
the Flowers story that raised all the big 
questions Friends of Justice has placed on the 
table. We anticipate that as the trial date 
approaches the case will attract national media 
attention, if only because no capital defendant 
has ever faced the same charges six times.

But Friends of Justice is encouraging reporters 
and advocacy groups to move beyond the 
unprecedented aspects of this story. We are 
witnessing a wrongful prosecution in the making. 
The prosecution, we contend, is using a form of 
legal sleight of hand to transform a hopeless 
jumble of contradictory facts into a coherent 
narrative. By questioning the competency and 
objectivity of the state prosecutor and by taking 
the state’s evidentiary cards off the table 
one-by-one, we intend to derail a flawed and 
dangerous prosecution. In the process, we will 
draw parallels between the Flowers case and 
prosecutions like the Troy Davis case in Georgia 
and the Kelvin Kaigler case in Louisiana that 
follow the same dangerous pattern.

WHAT CAN be done to support Curtis Flowers?

THE FIRST step is to become educated about the 
case. The Friends of Justice Web site 
(<http://www.friendsofjustice.net>www.friendsofjustice.net) 
has a separate Curtis Flowers section devoted 
exclusively to the facts and historical 
background. Stories appearing in the mainstream 
and alternative media will also appear in this section.

Secondly, we are planning a series of Common 
Peace Civil Rights tours through Montgomery 
County and the Mississippi Delta that will have 
life-changing impact. There will be opportunities 
on the Web site to sign up for this experience.

Finally, trial number six begins on June 7, 2010, 
and the presence of outside observers would be most welcome.

CAN YOU tell us about the recent work of Friends of Justice?

FRIENDS OF Justice has always tackled factually 
ambiguous cases where the prosecution’s narrative 
doesn’t fit the facts. Most advocacy groups shy 
away from actual legal cases in anticipation of 
the “But what if he’s guilty?” question. In 
recent years, actual innocence cases rooted in 
unassailable DNA evidence have gained nationwide 
attention. Unfortunately, less than 15 percent of 
criminal cases involve meaningful DNA evidence 
and the DNA in all but a few cold cases has already been tested.

Friends of Justice believes the time has come to 
demand that prosecutors prove guilt beyond a 
reasonable doubt no matter how heinous the crime. 
Too many cases are marred by witness 
manipulation, junk science, and crude attempts to 
undermine the perceived character of defendants. 
For this reason, Friends of Justice is focusing 
on a string of cases in Texas and the South 
featuring similar fact patterns and dangerous 
prosecutorial tactics. In none of these cases can 
we prove actual innocence to a certainty, but we 
shouldn’t have to. When the state can win 
convictions without meeting its proper burden, 
innocent people go to prison. By focusing on 
cases with a high potential for wrongful 
conviction, Friends of Justice is drawing 
national attention to a serious problem that is rarely acknowledged.

Currently, we are monitoring a trial in 
Lafayette, Louisiana, in which several 
African-American defendants are being prosecuted 
in federal court largely on the basis of inmate 
snitch testimony. In an earlier case in the same 
court, Friends of Justice alleged that inmates 
were running perjury mills in the federal prison 
system with the purpose of cobbling together 
convincing, but completely manufactured, 
testimony. There is no parole in the federal 
system and inmates serving multi-decade sentences 
can earn generous time cuts by testifying against former associates.

At the same time, we will be investigating the 
case of Kelvin “Dreads” Kaigler, a young 
African-American resident of Slidell, Louisiana, 
who was recently convicted of murder on the sole 
testimony of a white drug dealer facing a life 
sentence. Essentially, the drug dealer was given 
a choice between sixty years without parole if he 
refused to implicate Kelvin, and seven years if he did.

While working on the Kaigler case, we were 
contacted by the mother of yet another young man 
who was recently prosecuted by the same court and 
in the same fashion. Ultimately, Friends of 
Justice will convince a skeptical public that 
wrongful conviction is a major problem that can 
be diagnosed, exposed, and eradicated.

Joe Allen is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931859493/counterpunchmaga>Vietnam: 
The (Last) War the U.S. Lost.




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