The district attorney who put Curtis Flowers on trial six times has been sued by the Black man wrongfully imprisoned for 23 years.
According to ABC News, Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans and three investigators have been named in a lawsuit filed on Friday (Sept. 3). Evans and the investigators are accused of engaging in wrongdoing, including “pressuring witnesses into fabricating statements about seeing Mr. Flowers on the day of the murders and ignoring other possible suspects,” according to the lawsuit. Amount of money sought by Flowers is not stated in the lawsuit. A jury will make that decision.
Flowers, who was convicted in the 1996 shooting deaths of four people, spent nearly half of his life on death row. Up until two weeks before the shootings at the Winona Tardy Furniture Store, he was employed there. Bertha Tardy and three of her employees, Carmen Rigby, Robert Golden, and Derrick Stewart, were shot to death in the head.
Despite no known motive and little evidence, Flowers was charged with the homicides. Several experts hinted at the possibility of more than one person being involved in the shooting, but Flowers was the only one charged. As a result, he was convicted four times: twice for all four murders and twice for the individual murders. There have also been two mistrials involving all four deaths, with every conviction getting overturned. Lynn Fitch, Mississippi’s attorney general, announced in 2020 that the state would not pursue Flowers’ seventh trial, freeing him at long last after 23 years in prison.
Previously, the state of Mississippi was ordered by a judge to pay Flowers $500,000 for wrongful imprisonment.
This article was penned by Jonathan P. Wright. Jonathan is a freelance writer for multiple mainstream publications and CVO of RADIOPUSHERS. You can read more of his work by clicking here.
