The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared poised to side with a black Mississ...
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared poised to side with a black Mississippi death row inmate tried six times for a 1996 quadruple murder who accused a prosecutor of repeatedly removing black jurors to help win a conviction, in an oral argument in which Justice Clarence Thomas broke a three-year silence.
The Flowers case is the latest dispute to reach the justices over allegations of racial bias in an American criminal justice system in which blacks and other minorities are disproportionately represented in prison populations. Some prosecutors, including in Southern states like Mississippi, have been accused over the decades of trying to ensure predominately white juries for trials of black defendants.
The other justices largely sounded supportive of Flowers’ claim. “You can’t take the history out of this case,” conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh told the state’s lawyer, Jason Davies. On race issues, Thomas has been a decisive vote to restrict affirmative action programs designed to help minorities overcome past discrimination. In 2013, he was part of the majority as the court ruled 5-4 to strike down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965 to protect black voters in Southern states from ongoing discrimination.
Flowers appealed to the Supreme Court after the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2017 upheld his most recent conviction and death sentence, with his lawyers saying the history of striking black jurors in the prior trials was relevant in reviewing the most recent conviction.
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