Mississippi Man Tried for Sixth Time for Same Crime

Mississippi Man Tried for Sixth Time for Same Crime


So much for double jeopardy. The provision in law that forbids an individual from being tried twice for the same crime has not applied to Curtis Flowers. The African-American man is now facing his sixth trial for allegedly killing four people at a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi, on July 16, 1996. The victims, the owner, two white employees and one black employee, were shot executive-style with bullets in the back of the head. Flowers, who had worked at the store for three days in July, was charged with the crime the following January. Prosecutors claimed that he was angry because money had been deducted from his paycheck for damaged merchandise.

The murder weapon was never recovered, and no fingerpring of DNA evidence was found linking Flowers to the crime. Flowers had no criminal record.

According to Truthout, the half dozen attempts by prosecutors to convict Flowers of the murders is a record for the American judicial system. He’s been held in jail since 1997, and gone to trial in 1997, 1999, 2004, 2007, 2008 and now 2010. His five previous trials ended either in hung juries or overturned convictions. The first two times, Flowers was found guilty, but his convictions were overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court.

At the 2008 trial, one of the three black jurors, a retired teacher named James Bibbs, refused to convict Flowers and was charged with perjury for failing to reveal that he had been near the scene of the crime on the day the murders took place, but the charges were later dropped.

http://www.allgov.com/Controversies/ViewNews/Mississippi_Man_Tried_for_Sixth_Time_for_Same_Crime_100612

Can we use that on BP executives?

I was thinking that.

And in his second one, too. You'd think he'd make a point to correctly define double jeopardy before writing an article premised on it.

him being found "not guilty". Hung juries and 'found guilty, which was overturned by the Supreme Court" don't really meet those definitions.

I'm not a lawyer, so I can't be sure of that, but they try people all the time a second time when there's a hung jury.