When the Supreme Court justices decide the fate of Curtis Flowers, whose case will be argued next Wednesday, they will weigh more than a century of judicial precedents, complex arguments and intricate legal theories. Underneath all that, the case will boil down to two core American ideals: fairness and equality, says APM reports. At issue is whether Flowers, a black man in Mississippi, had his constitutional rights violated by a white prosecutor. Flowers’ side argues that the prosecutor, Doug Evans, intentionally struck black jurors because of their race at Flowers’ 2010 trial, his sixth for the 1996 murders of four people in Winona, Ms.
Their argument is part of a lineage that can be traced to the end of the Civil War. The fight for inclusion on juries — of all races, ethnicities and genders — started with the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 as part of Reconstruction to ensure that freed blacks had the same rights as whites. The Supreme Court first took on the topic in 1880, when it cited the Fourteenth Amendment to rule in favor of Taylor Strauder, a former slave who’d been convicted of murder in West Virginia. At the time, West Virginia law stated that only white men could be called for jury service. The Supreme Court found that the state’s law discriminated against black would-be jurors and violated the constitutional rights of black defendants. To this day, defendants don’t have a right to a jury that looks like their community. That’s why, in 2010 — more than a century after Strauder guaranteed that Curtis Flowers’ 156-person pool of qualified jurors would be 42 percent African-American (roughly matching the demographics of the county) — Flowers still ended up with a jury that was 92 percent white. APM reviews key cases on the issue over the years.