This Aug. 3, 2017 photo provided by Mississippi Department of Corrections shows Curtis Flowers, who's murder case has gone to trial six times.
Mississippi Department of Corrections via AP
A Mississippi judge on Monday set bail for Curtis Flowers, five months after the United States Supreme Court reversed his latest murder conviction due to racial discrimination by a prosecutor who methodically excluded black jurors in Flowers's six separate trials for the same crime.
A black man, the 49-year-old Flower has been in prison for more than 22 years, much of that time on death row. He had never been granted bail in the case before.
Judge Joseph Loper set bond of $250,000 for Flowers after a hearing Monday morning.
It was not immediately clear when Flowers's bond would be posted and when he would be set free.
His case was profiled by the podcast "In the Dark," which uncovered new evidence suggesting he was innocent of the slayings of four people at the Tardy Furniture Store in Winona, MS, in 1996.
The podcast also detailed how the prosecutor in the case, Doug Evans, repeatedly sought to keep blacks off juries considering Flowers's fate.
In the Dark also found that Evans had a pattern of using peremptory challenges during jury selection in other cases to keep blacks off juries at a much higher rate than whites.
Evans, who did not attend Monday's bail hearing, has not said whether he plans to retry Flowers, who has been convicted four times of the murders. All four convictions were reversed on appeal, while two other trials ended in mistrials.
Flowers's lawyer Rob McDuff argued that he was entitled to bail due to Mississippi law which requires bail after there are two mistrials for a capital murder case.
In June, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the court's 7-2 opinion overturning Flowers' most recent conviction in 2010, said that the judge who presided at the sixth trial committed "clear error" by concluding that Evans's strike of a black juror was not motivated by discrimination.
Kavanaugh said Evans showed a "relentless, determined" effort to rid the jury of black members and try Flowers "ideally before an all-white jury."
"Equal justice under law requires a criminal trial free of racial discrimination in the jury selection process," Kavanaugh wrote in the decision.
Evans had barred 41 out of 42 potential black jurors from Flowers' trials, including 5 out of 6 potential black jurors in the sixth trial, the Supreme Court ruling noted.
The Supreme Court held in the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky that purposeful racial discrimination in the selection of a jury is unlawful.
This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.
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Judge sets bail for Curtis Flowers — black man tried six times for same murders — after Supreme Court reversed case detailed in podcast - CNBC
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