Mississippi must pay $500,000 to man wrongfully incarcerated for 23 years
Jessica Schladebeck
The state of Mississippi has been ordered to pay its maximum compensation amount of $500,000 to Curtis Flowers, who has spent nearly half of his life behind bars for a quadruple murder he did not commit.
Mississippi 5th Circuit Judge George Mitchell made the ruling on Tuesday, according to The Clarion Ledger.
The 50-year-old, a Black man from Winona, had been tried six different times between 1997 and 2010 in the shooting deaths of four people in 1996. He spent more 23 years behind bars before he was released from prison in December 2019, after the Supreme Court concluded Black people were intentionally excluded from the jury pool during his trial in 2010.