Curtis Flowers, whose death sentence was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court after he was tried six times for the same killings, died Wednesday at his home in Winona, Mississippi, according to CBS News. He was 56. No cause of death was given.
Flowers spent 23 years in jail before his 2019 release on bail, six months after the Supreme Court’s ruling in his case. His death closes the public chapter of a case that became a national example of prosecutorial misconduct in jury selection.
The Main Development
Flowers died at his Winona home on Oct. 8, 2026, CBS News reported. The outlet did not report a cause of death.
Before his death, Flowers described his release from custody in blunt terms. “And I’m telling you, I felt like I was floating. I was just ready to go,” he said, according to CBS News.
What It Means For The Case’s Legacy
The Curtis Flowers case stands as one of the most cited examples of racial bias in jury selection reaching the nation’s highest court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the Supreme Court majority in 2019, said prosecutors made a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals,” according to CBS News.
That finding did not clear Flowers of the underlying accusations. The Supreme Court’s ruling overturned his conviction on jury-selection and evidentiary grounds rather than ruling on his innocence. No cause of death and no update on the case’s final legal status beyond his 2019 release on bail were reported.
Background And Context
The case traces back to July 1996, when four people were shot execution-style at Tardy Furniture in Winona: the store owner, a bookkeeper, a delivery man and a 16-year-old, CBS News reported. Flowers had briefly worked at the store that summer but was let go after three days.
Police questioned Flowers after the killings but did not arrest him immediately. He was arrested in Texas in January 1997. He had no prior criminal history, according to CBS News.
District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted Flowers in all six trials. In the first trial, an all-White jury convicted the then-27-year-old Flowers after just one hour of deliberation, and he was sentenced to death. The first three convictions were later overturned because of the prosecutor’s misrepresentation of evidence to the jury and discrimination in jury selection, CBS News reported.
No murder weapon was ever found, and no DNA or fingerprint evidence linked Flowers to the crime scene, according to the outlet. An investigation by American Public Media’s podcast “In the Dark” led several witnesses, including one who had claimed Flowers confessed, to recant their accounts.
An analysis of court data cited by CBS News found that across Flowers’ six trials, 61 of the 72 jurors seated were White, and all 61 voted to convict. The data also showed Evans had a history of excluding Black jurors at a disproportionate rate.
What’s Next
CBS News did not report funeral arrangements or further details about Flowers’ life in the years following his 2019 release on bail. No additional information on the final disposition of the case against him was available.
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