WASHINGTON _ The Supreme Court on Wednesday sounded ready to overturn a Mississippi murder conviction based on racial bias during jury selection.
It marked the latest chapter in an extraordinary case involving a small-town white prosecutor who had repeatedly excluded or restricted black jurors from serving on six separate trials of Curtis Flowers, an African-American defendant accused of killing four people.
Mississippi state attorneys ran into sharp skepticism, not just from the court's liberals, but from new Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh as well.
"We can't take the history out of this case," Kavanaugh said. The white prosecutor moved to strike 41 of 42 black prospective jurors, he noted.
"How do you look at that and not come away thinking" that a blatant racial bias was at work, Kavanaugh asked.
The prosecutor, Doug Evans, had repeatedly used his allotted juror challenges to exclude blacks from the panel. In 2010, he won a murder conviction on all four counts _ with a jury that had only one African-American and 11 whites.
Wednesday's argument included a rare question from Justice Clarence Thomas. In his first question in open court since 2016, Thomas _ who in the past has been skeptical of cases seeking to show racial bias in jury selection _ asked whether the defense attorney in the Flowers trial had also excluded jurors, and what the race was of those potential jurors.
The history of racism in Mississippi loomed over the argument, and the only question for the justices seemed to be whether to focus narrowly on the jury in the last trial or on the pattern of racial discrimination that played out over all six.
In July 1996, four employees of a furniture store were found shot to death in Winona, Miss. Evans charged Flowers for the killings in part because he had been fired from the store a few days before.
The case has made legal history in Mississippi. Not only has it resulted in two mistrials and four convictions _ three overturned _ but the saga was also the focus of a well-regarded podcast, "In the Dark," that raised questions about the evidence against Flowers.
Cornell law professor Sheri Johnson, who represents Flowers, urged the justices to set aside the conviction yet again because the prosecutor has shown he will not abide by the law when it comes to selecting a jury.
"The history is relevant. It is a history of a desire for an all-white jury," she said. In the sixth trial, like those before, the prosecutor took a different approach with whites and blacks, she said. He peppered potential black jurors with numerous questions in an effort to find a nonracial reason to exclude them, but accepted potential white jurors after only asking a question or two, she said.
For the high court, it is the latest of many attempts to remove race as a factor in choosing jurors.
The allegedly pattern of racially biased questions violates the constitutional rule set in a 1986 case called Batson vs. Kentucky, Johnson said, and calls for reversing the conviction yet again.
