William Browning on the Groundhog Day of Capital Murder Trials

In Mississippi early in the summer of 2010, emotionally spent jurors, some of them in tears, recommended that Curtis Giovanni Flowers be put to death for a quadruple murder. The judge agreed with the recommendation, sending Flowers to death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. The trial had lasted two weeks, and from beginning to end the Montgomery County Courthouse was filled with an unnerving sense of déjà vu.

That's because the 41-year-old Flowers has now been sentenced to death four times for the same crime. The first three convictions were thrown out on appeal by the Mississippi Supreme Court. The fourth, handed down June 18, 2010, is currently on appeal at the state's highest court. Two other trials ended with hung juries. All told, reports William Browning in our April 2012 issue, Flowers has stood trial six times—a record in the history of American capital murder cases. He has become the judicial system's answer to Groundhog Day.