Curtis Flowers died at 56 after Mississippi dismissed the capital case built in six trials.

Mississippi Today reported that in June 2019 the Supreme Court voted 7-2 to overturn the conviction and said then-District Attorney Doug Evans intentionally struck Black prospective jurors. The Associated Press reported Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that those strikes deprived Flowers of a fair trial. He was released in December 2019, Circuit Judge Joey Loper dismissed the capital charges with prejudice in September 2020, and he died on Oct. 7, 2026.

Montgomery County Coroner Allan Pratt told Mississippi Today that Curtis Flowers' body was found Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026, and that the death is an "ongoing investigation." Mississippi Today reported no cause was released. WLBT reported the same limited account: Flowers, 56, was found dead Wednesday, and the coroner gave no further details. Attorney Rob McDuff told the Associated Press, in the account The Guardian also published, that the family confirmed Flowers died Wednesday at his home in Mississippi, and that no cause of death was given. The Mississippi Center for Justice, where McDuff is director of impact litigation, said he died at his home in Winona. A coroner's open investigation is not a cause of death.

On July 16, 1996, four people were shot and killed at Tardy Furniture in Winona, Mississippi Today reported: store owner Bertha Tardy and employees Robert Golden, Carmen Rigby, and Derrick Stewart. Then-Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted Flowers six times. Mississippi Today reported that Flowers maintained his innocence, and that each prosecution ended in a hung jury or in a guilty verdict a higher court later overturned. Evans won a conviction at the sixth trial, and Flowers was sentenced to death. The Associated Press reported that sixth trial was in 2010, that Evans struck five Black prospective jurors, and that the jury was 11 white jurors and one Black juror. Those strikes and that verdict are what the later ruling threw out.

In June 2019 the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 to overturn the conviction, Mississippi Today reported, and said Evans intentionally struck Black people from serving on the jury. The decision is Flowers v. Mississippi. The Associated Press reported Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the removal of Black prospective jurors deprived Flowers of a fair trial. That holding is Batson v. Kentucky applied to one prosecutor across six trials: peremptory strikes may not be used to keep people off a jury because of race. The price of reaching that ruling was the six prosecutions. The Associated Press reported Flowers remained in prison for six months after the decision because he was still under indictment, and that he was released in December 2019 after a judge set bond. Mississippi Today reported the December 2019 release was on bail, ahead of a possible seventh trial, that Evans then recused himself, and that the attorney general's office took the case. WLBT reported Attorney General Lynn Fitch announced the state would not try him again and dropped the charges. In September 2020, Circuit Judge Joey Loper dismissed the capital murder charges with prejudice on the attorney general's motion, Mississippi Today reported. A dismissal with prejudice ends the case.

WLBT reported that in 2021 Flowers was awarded $500,000 under Mississippi's wrongful-incarceration law, and that a court order required the state to pay it in installments of $50,000 a year over 10 years. Mississippi Today reported a judge ordered that compensation after the dismissal. The same account said the American Public Media podcast In the Dark investigated the prosecution, including a history of racial bias in Evans's jury selection and evidence suggesting another person may have committed the killings. What a podcast presented is not a verdict. The charges had already been dismissed. When they were dropped, Flowers said in a statement the Associated Press published, "Today, I am finally free from the injustice that left me locked in a box for nearly 23 years." He also said, "I've been asked if I ever thought this day would come. I have been blessed with a family that never gave up on me and with them by my side, I knew it would." The Associated Press reported he had spent more than 22 years in prison. December 2019 to Oct. 7, 2026, is the time he had after the bond. Tucker Carrington, director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project, said in a statement Mississippi Today published for the legal team, "For that, his name is etched into U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence — about what it means to fight for a fair trial free from racial bias in the selection of jurors." The line those six trials crossed is the general one. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.