Opinion | A Blow Against Racism in Jury Selection

The Supreme Court on Friday reversed the conviction of Curtis Flowers, a death row inmate who has faced trial six times for a quadruple murder in 1996 at a furniture store in Winona, Miss., a crime he has said he did not commit. In Flowers v. Mississippi, the court issued a clarion statement that racism has no place in the courtroom.

Writing for himself and six of his colleagues, the court’s newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh, said that “the extraordinary facts” of Mr. Flowers’s case showed that the state of Mississippi — or more specifically, Doug Evans, the prosecutor in the case — violated the dictates of Batson v. Kentucky, a landmark 1986 ruling that prohibits the striking of potential jurors on the basis of their race.

Justice Kavanaugh examined the record in painstaking detail and noted that in Mr. Flowers’s six trials, Mr. Evans had struck 41 of 42 black potential jurors — and at the sixth trial, the one directly under review by the Supreme Court, Mr. Evans had done the same with five of the six. At that trial, Mr. Evans asked potential black jurors an average of 29 questions each. He asked the 11 white jurors who were eventually seated an average of one question each.

Justice Kavanaugh said that the “dramatically disparate questioning” of black jurors to find a pretext to strike them “strongly suggests that the State was motivated in substantial part by a discriminatory intent.”

That damning conclusion vindicates both Batson and enduring principles of equal justice under law. The circumstances surrounding Mr. Flowers’s trial and subsequent retrials caused even Justice Samuel Alito, who has long been skeptical of capital defendants, to join the majority opinion and show some sympathy for Mr. Flowers. In a two-page concurrence, Justice Alito suggested that a new trial may not even be possible in the county where Mr. Evans brought the charges time and again.

In a dissenting opinion joined partly by Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Clarence Thomas said he saw no racial discrimination and chastised the majority for taking the case in the first place. (In one portion of his opinion that no one else joined he even suggested that Batson might have been wrongly decided.)

There is much more mischief in Mr. Flowers’s case that the Supreme Court didn’t examine, and the state of Mississippi would be well advised to think deeply before proceeding with a seventh trial. As the podcast “In the Dark” has chronicled, there are strong indications that Mr. Evans’s case against Mr. Flowers rested on faulty forensic evidence; unreliable testimony from a jailhouse informant; and various misrepresentations that, if not somehow addressed, could well undermine the public’s trust in yet another prosecution.