Curtis Flowers, the Black Mississippi man whose death-penalty conviction was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court after more than 22 years in prison, died Wednesday at his home in Mississippi. He was 56. His family confirmed the death, and attorney Rob McDuff told the Associated Press that no cause of death was given. Flowers was 26 when he was arrested months after the July 1996 shooting deaths of four people inside a Winona, Mississippi, furniture store. Prosecutors cast him as a disgruntled former employee seeking revenge for being fired, and nearly $300 was found missing after the killings. He was tried six times, convicted four times, and every conviction was ultimately overturned.

The surprise at the heart of this story is that one man could be tried six times for the same crime and four times convicted, with every verdict erased. In June 2019 the Supreme Court threw out his sixth-trial conviction and death sentence in a 7-2 decision, ruling that prosecutors had shown an unconstitutional pattern of excluding African American jurors. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the removal of Black prospective jurors deprived Flowers of a fair trial, noting that district attorney Doug Evans had removed 41 of the 42 prospective Black jurors across the six trials. Flowers remained imprisoned six months more before a judge set bond, and he walked free in December 2019.

After his release, the consequences of the case reached beyond Flowers himself. In 2021, Flowers sued Evans and three investigators, claiming misconduct including "pressuring witnesses to fabricate claims about seeing Mr. Flowers in particular locations on the day of the murders" and ignoring other possible suspects, per CBC News. Evans retired in 2023 after more than 30 years as district attorney, his jury selection tactics having been scrutinized for years. At the time of his release Flowers said, "Today, I am finally free from the injustice that left me locked in a box for nearly twenty three years."

His legal team, which represented him for more than two decades, said 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 team said they felt "privileged to have called him a client" and, after his exoneration, "equally honoured to call him a friend," adding that whether he was on death row or fishing in a local pond, "Curtis shared his light." For true-crime readers, Flowers' case remains the defining modern example of jury-selection misconduct, and his death closes a chapter on a case that reshaped how courts weigh racial bias.