Curtis Flowers, wrongfully convicted man who was on death row, dies at 56

Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Mississippi who was wrongfully convicted multiple times when he was tried six times for the same crime by the same prosecutor, has died. He was 56.

Flowers' family confirmed that he died Wednesday at his home in Mississippi, attorney Rob McDuff told The Associated Press on Thursday.

No cause of death was given, said McDuff, who was part of Flowers' legal team.

CBS News has reached out to McDuff and the coroner.

Flowers' struggle with the justice system began in Winona, Mississippi, on a July morning in 1996, when the owner of Tardy Furniture, a bookkeeper, a delivery man and a 16-year-old were shot in the head execution-style.

Flowers briefly worked at the furniture store that summer, but he was let go after he stopped showing up after only three days. Police questioned him after the murders, but didn't arrest him at the time. Flowers later moved to Texas to live with his sister, and he was arrested there in January 1997. He had no prior criminal history.

McDuff previously called Flowers' case "unprecedented in the history of the American legal system."

He told "60 Minutes" in 2021 that the first three convictions against Flowers were overturned "because of the prosecutor's misrepresentation of the evidence to the jury and because of his discrimination in the selection of the jury."

The murder weapon was never found, and there was no DNA or fingerprints linking Flowers to the crime.

In the first trial, an all-White jury convicted him after just an hour of deliberation. Flowers, then 27, was sentenced to death. 

His conviction was appealed and overturned. But he was tried five more times for the same crime by the same prosecutor. He had three more convictions overturned on appeal, in addition to two mistrials.

The prosecutor was District Attorney Doug Evans, who in 2010 finally got a conviction to stick in trial six, and Flowers returned to death row. 

Then reporters at American Public Media's podcast "In the Dark" looked into the case. Their investigation led witnesses, including one who said Flowers had confessed, to recant their stories.

"In the Dark" reporters and producers also analyzed decades of court data that revealed Evans had a history of excluding Black people from juries at a disproportionate rate. Across all of Flowers' trials, 61 of the 72 jurors were White. All 61 voted to convict. 

In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Evans and the state of Mississippi had violated Flowers' constitutional rights and overturned his conviction yet again. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that there was a "relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals." Six months later, Flowers was released on bail, leaving jail for the first time in 23 years.

"And I'm telling you, I felt like I was floating. I was just ready to go," Flowers told CBS News in 2021.