Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday threw out the murder conviction and death sentence for a black man in Mississippi because of a prosecutor's efforts to keep African Americans off the jury. The defendant already has been tried six times and now could face a seventh trial.
In Flowers' sixth trial, the jury was made up of 11 whites and one African American. Prosecutor Evans struck five black prospective jurors. In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas called Kavanaugh's opinion "manifestly incorrect" and wrote that Flowers "presented no evidence whatsoever of purposeful race discrimination." Justice Neil Gorsuch joined most of Thomas' opinion.
Flowers was arrested several months later, described by prosecutors as a disgruntled former employee who sought revenge against the store's owner because she fired him and withheld most of his pay to cover the cost of merchandise he damaged. Nearly $300 was found missing after the killings. Evans did not respond to email requests for comment and no one answered the phone in his office Friday.
Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the nation's pre-eminent civil rights attorney, was part of the Batson case majority, but he said the only way to end discrimination in jury selection was to eliminate peremptory strikes.
This antiquated American jury system must just be tossed away We live in a very polarised and prejudiced world that any case on any social matter is bound to cause divisions Better the decision be made by a legally trained and competent person than by people driven by emotions
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