A Racial Pattern So Obvious, Even the Supreme Court Might See It

The American legal system pretends to marble-and-mahogany majesty, but is in fact often a rickety, underfunded contraption, run by overworked mortals who are sometimes incompetent and sometimes actually ill-intentioned. But even amid law’s cratered landscape, sometimes a specific case presents facts simply beyond belief; sometimes the “system” stands revealed as nothing more than one human being tormenting another because he can.

For me, such a case is Flowers v. Mississippi, a death-penalty appeal to be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The specific issue the Court will hear is whether, during a murder trial in 2010, a Mississippi prosecutor named Doug Evans deliberately used “peremptory challenges” to remove potential jurors because of race. If the U.S. Supreme Court agrees, then Flowers’s conviction for multiple murders in 1996 will be set aside.

Of course, if that happens, Evans can simply try Flowers again on the same charges. And why wouldn’t he? Evans has already prosecuted Flowers for the same crime six times