US Supreme Court orders retrial of a man on death row saying that prosecutor engaged in unconstitutional racial discrimination when striking African-American jurors from the panel

The Supreme Court held on Friday that a black Mississippi death row inmate should get a new trial, saying that the prosecutor who tried him six times for murder engaged in unconstitutional racial discrimination when striking African-American jurors from the panel.

The decision was 7-2, and was delivered by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who said black and white potential jurors are not treated equally by prosecutors.

“The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the state wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Curtis Flowers, who is African-American, was tried five times for the 1996 murder of four people inside a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. But it was only in 2010, after his sixth trial, that a conviction stuck and Flowers was sentenced to death.

Flowers had wanted his conviction overturned. His lawyers asked the justices to hold that the prosecutor, Doug Evans, who brought each case, broke the law by engaging in race discrimination during jury selection.

“So in the real world of criminal trials against black defendants, both history and math tell us that a system of race-based peremptories does not treat black defendants and black prospective jurors equally with prosecutors and white prospective jurors equally with prosecutors and white prospective jurors,” Kavanaugh wrote.

“Equal justice under law requires a criminal trial free of racial discrimination in the jury selection process,” he added, citing the words inscribed on the front of the Supreme Court building.

Via CNN