https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/in-the-dark-podcast-reveals-miscarriage-of-justice-in-mississippi/
A new podcast sheds light on the case of a man who’s spent the last 22 years in prison, tried for the same murder over and over and over again.
American Public Media’s In the Dark podcast has done more in its two years than many podcasts will likely do in ten. Last year, it won a Peabody Award for what Rashida Jones called its “tour de force reporting” on the 1989 kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling, which examined the absurd, almost comical ineptness of the law-enforcement officials in charge of the Wetterling case. Nothing exposes the incompetence and corruption of bad government like journalists doing good old-fashioned journalism.
This year, In the Dark performed not so much a tour de force as a magnum opus of investigation. The show, hosted by journalist Madeleine Baran along with a crew of reporters and producers, headed to Winona, Miss., to examine what may be the most bizarre legal spectacle in modern American history: A man who has been tried in court six times for the same crime.
That man, Curtis Flowers, is black. He has been charged repeatedly with a gruesome, execution-style mass murder perpetrated in Winona in 1996, at a downtown furniture store where he had briefly worked and from which he had been fired a few days before the crime.
The local district attorney, Doug Evans, a white man, charged Flowers with the murders, claiming that there was enough evidence to place him at the scene of the murders on the day they took place. The verdicts in five of the six trials that subsequently ensued were overturned on appeal; each time, Evans simply charged and tried Flowers again, using the same evidence to convict him once more.
Piece by piece, In the Dark deals serious blows to the evidence that Evans has used to convict Flowers over and over again. The testimony of a ballistics expert is shown to be pointedly dubious; witnesses cited by the prosecution, some of them obviously unreliable, have recanted or contradicted their testimony; the star witness for the prosecution later explicitly admitted that he had lied under oath about Flowers’ having confessed to the murders.