Curtis Flowers, the Mississippi man whose death sentence was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, has died at age 56. Multiple outlets report that he spent more than two decades in prison, including time on death row, before his conviction and sentence were thrown out.
Flowers was arrested in connection with a July 1996 shooting in Winona, Mississippi, that killed four people inside a furniture store. Outlets also emphasize that he was tried multiple times for the same killings—CBS News describes six separate attempts to prosecute him—an aspect that some legal advocates characterize as highly unusual. While outlets vary in how they frame the case—some focus on the Supreme Court’s reversal, others on the length of his imprisonment or the repeated trials—they agree on the core timeline: the 1996 killings, Flowers’ long incarceration, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to set aside his conviction and death sentence before his death was reported.
