7 Black Inmates Who Turned Parchman Farm Into America's Deadliest Prison

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]There is a prison in the Mississippi Delta that was built to be a plantation.

[00:00:04]Not built to look like one.

[00:00:07]Not built with plantation imagery for atmosphere or historical reference.

[00:00:11]Built to function as one.

[00:00:13]Built on the grounds of the former Parchman Plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in 1901 with three founding principles that the Mississippi Department of Corrections articulated without apology.

[00:00:28]The prison must profit at any cost.

[00:00:30]Armed inmates were effective low-cost guards, and corporal punishment was an acceptable means of control.

[00:00:36]The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery in 1865.

[00:00:42]It included an exception. Slavery was abolished except as a punishment for crime.

[00:00:48]The men who designed Parchman Farm understood that exception and built an institution around it.

[00:00:54]By 1905, 4 years after it opened, 91% of Parchman's inmates were black.

[00:01:01]They worked cotton fields from dawn to dusk under temperatures that could reach 100°.

[00:01:07]They were beaten with a leather strap, 3 ft long and 6 in wide, known as Black Annie, which hung from the driver's belt.

[00:01:16]They were guarded by fellow inmates, the most violent men in the prison system, armed by the state and empowered to shoot escapees in exchange for pardons.

[00:01:27]They dropped from exhaustion, pneumonia, malaria, frostbite, sunstroke, dysentery, and what historians documented as shackle poisoning.

[00:01:37]The constant rubbing of chains and leg irons against bare flesh. Author David Oshinsky, whose book Worse Than Slavery is the definitive history of Parchman Farm, wrote that it was the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.

[00:01:52]It is still open. The Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman is still operating on the same land with a population that is still 70% black in a state where black people make up 37% of the population.

[00:02:06]In 2019 and 2020, it was the site of one of the worst prison crises in modern American history.

[00:02:13]16 violent deaths in a few weeks.

[00:02:16]Gang warfare, no running water, no electricity, black mold, men sleeping on concrete, and contraband cell phone videos smuggled out to families that showed men being stabbed and chased through corridors lit only by phone cameras.

[00:02:34]The United States Department of Justice investigated.

[00:02:37]The DOJ found systematic constitutional violations.

[00:02:42]It found an environment of unreasonable violence.

[00:02:45]It found 10 homicides in 2019 alone.

[00:02:51]In 2020, a federal investigation documented an inmate who had been stabbed 89 times.

[00:02:57]Another who had been stabbed 75 times.

[00:03:01]A third who had been strangled to death in the same week.

[00:03:05]The plantation built in 1901 is still producing what plantations produce.

[00:03:10]The extraction of human life without accountability, without adequate oversight, without the basic minimum that human beings in any institution are supposed to be guaranteed.

[00:03:21]Today we tell the stories of seven black men who passed through its walls.

[00:03:26]Some of them committed real crimes.

[00:03:29]Some of them were innocent and had their years taken by a system that needed a body and chose theirs.

[00:03:37]All of them have names. All of them have documented stories.

[00:03:41]And all of them experienced something at Parchman Farm that the history of this country has been trying to forget for more than a century.

[00:03:49]We count from seven to one. We start with a legend.

[00:03:52]We end with the man whose case reached the Supreme Court of the United States and whose story is the most complete answer to the question of what Parchman Farm actually is.

[00:04:04]Number seven, Bukka White.

[00:04:07]His full name was Booker T. Washington White.

[00:04:10]He was born in 1906 in Houston, Mississippi, in the heart of the Delta, the flat, hot, cotton-rich bottomland of northwestern Mississippi.

[00:04:21]That was the birthplace of the blues and the site of some of the most extreme racial exploitation in American history.

[00:04:28]He taught himself guitar as a child, absorbing the specific musical language of the Mississippi Delta blues, the slide guitar, the field hollers, the songs that documented the lives of black men and women in a place where documentation was a form of survival.

[00:04:46]By the 1930s, Bukka White was recording.

[00:04:49]His voice was powerful and rough and honest in the way that the Delta blues demanded honesty, not as a performance of emotion, but as a documentation of experience.

[00:05:01]He recorded for Vocalion Records. He performed across the South. He was by the standards available to a black blues musician in the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s building something.

[00:05:13]In 1937, he shot a man in Clarksdale, Mississippi, during an altercation.

[00:05:19]The man survived. Bukka White was convicted and sentenced to Parchman Farm.

[00:05:24]He arrived at the most notorious prison in the American South and did what the Mississippi Delta blues had always done with the most extreme human experiences available.

[00:05:36]He turned it into music. From inside Parchman Farm, Bukka White composed the songs that would become some of the most important recorded documents of the prison blues tradition.

[00:05:48]Parchman Farm Blues, Shake 'Em On Down, District Attorney Blues, When Can I Change My Clothes? The titles alone are a documentary record of what it meant to be a black man inside that institution in the late 1930s.

[00:06:03]The specific experience of confinement, of labor, of the agricultural prison economy that Parchman had built around the bodies of black men from the Mississippi Delta.

[00:06:15]He recorded some of these songs in 1940 at Parchman itself when the Library of Congress sent folklorist Alan Lomax to document what was happening musically inside the prison.

[00:06:27]The recordings Lomax made at Parchman of Booker White and of other inmates singing work songs and blues and field hollers are among the most significant audio documents in the history of American music.

[00:06:40]They capture with a specificity that no written account could replicate the sound of black men laboring under conditions that were designed to destroy them.

[00:06:51]Booker White was released from Parchman in 1940.

[00:06:56]He resumed his music career. He influenced B.B. King, his nephew, who has credited White as one of his earliest and most significant musical mentors.

[00:07:06]He was rediscovered by blues researchers in the 1960s and performed at folk festivals and universities until his death in 1977.

[00:07:15]The music he made at Parchman is still played.

[00:07:19]It has been covered, sampled, studied, and documented for 80 years.

[00:07:24]The institution that imprisoned him is still operating on the same land where he sang those songs. Parchman Farm Blues was a warning. He wrote it from inside the place he was warning about.

[00:07:35]Every generation since has heard the warning. Mississippi has not closed the prison.

[00:07:40]What Booker White's story reveals about the relationship between black art and black suffering in the American South is something that goes beyond any single musician's biography.

[00:07:50]The Mississippi Delta blues, the specific musical tradition that Bukka White inhabited and extended and passed on to B.B. King and through King to the entire modern popular music world, was itself a product of conditions that Parchman Farm epitomized.

[00:08:08]The blues was the documentation of what it felt like to be black in the Mississippi Delta.

[00:08:14]The work songs, the field hollers, the 12-bar structures that carried grief and humor and defiance simultaneously, all of it grew from the same soil that Parchman Farm was cultivating with forced black labor.

[00:08:28]When Alan Lomax arrived at Parchman in 1940 with his recording equipment, he was doing something that the American folk music preservation movement had been doing across the South for decades.

[00:08:40]Documenting the music that black Americans were making in the most extreme circumstances available to them.

[00:08:47]Preserving it in recordings that the outside world could eventually access.

[00:08:52]The recordings he made at Parchman are archived at the Library of Congress.

[00:08:57]They are available to researchers and musicians and anyone who wants to hear what black men sounded like singing in a Mississippi prison camp in 1940.

[00:09:08]What those recordings preserved was not merely music, it was testimony.

[00:09:12]It was the specific sound of human beings maintaining something essential about themselves.

[00:09:18]Humor, community, artistry, the insistence on being more than what the institution had decided they were.

[00:09:27]Inside an environment designed to reduce them to labor units and nothing else.

[00:09:32]Bukka White survived Parchman.

[00:09:36]He went on to influence one of the most commercially significant musicians of the 20th century.

[00:09:41]His nephew became a global icon.

[00:09:44]The music White made in that prison camp traveled further than the prison itself ever imagined it would.

[00:09:51]That is not comfort. It is not a resolution.

[00:09:55]The music survived because the man survived.

[00:09:58]Many men at Parchman did not.

[00:10:00]Their songs, if they had any, were not recorded.

[00:10:04]Number six, Derrick Willis. He has been on Unit 29 at Parchman Farm for 24 years. Derrick Willis was convicted of capital murder and armed robbery and sentenced to two life terms in the Mississippi State Prison System.

[00:10:18]He arrived at Unit 29, Parchman's maximum security cell block, the housing unit that has developed what the Mississippi Public Broadcasting Network describes as a reputation as one of the most dangerous prison environments in the Western Hemisphere.

[00:10:34]And has been there for nearly a quarter century.

[00:10:38]Unit 29 opened in 1980. It was designed as a supermax in a controlled high-security housing unit for the most dangerous inmates in Mississippi's prison system.

[00:10:49]Over the decades since its opening, it has become something different from what its designers intended.

[00:10:55]Not because the management of dangerous men became easier, but because the state of Mississippi systematically defunded, understaffed, and neglected the facility while filling it with men who had nowhere else in the system to go.

[00:11:10]By 2019, Unit 29 had no reliable electricity in significant portions of the building.

[00:11:16]No running water in many cells.

[00:11:18]Black mold covering walls and ceilings.

[00:11:21]Rats. Flooding when it rained.

[00:11:24]Men sleeping on concrete because their mattresses had been destroyed or taken.

[00:11:29]Guards who were outmanned, outgunned in terms of contraband weapons, and in some cases actively complicit with the gang structures that had taken operational control of significant portions of the unit.

[00:11:44]In late December 2019, the crisis that had been building for years inside Unit 29 finally exploded in ways that the outside world could no longer ignore.

[00:11:55]Inmates used contraband cell phones to document what was happening and send the footage to their families.

[00:12:01]The footage showed fires burning in corridors, smoke filling darkened hallways, men being chased and attacked in spaces where no correctional officer was present.

[00:12:11]It showed the specific reality of what happens when a maximum security prison is operated with insufficient staff, crumbling infrastructure, and no meaningful accountability.

[00:12:24]Five men were killed in a 3-week period.

[00:12:27]Dozens were injured.

[00:12:29]Others took their own lives. Derek Willis has been living inside that environment for 24 years.

[00:12:35]When Mississippi Public Broadcasting documented life at Unit 29 in 2025, Willis was one of the named individuals whose experience was recorded.

[00:12:47]He has spent more than two decades on a unit that the DOJ found violated the constitutional rights of its inmates.

[00:12:55]He has survived the violence, the neglect, the specific psychological assault of long-term maximum security confinement in one of the most deteriorated prison facilities in the United States.

[00:13:08]What 24 years on Unit 29 does to a human being, to the specific cognitive and emotional architecture of a person who has spent that long in that environment, is something the clinical literature documents and that no sentence from the outside can fully capture.

[00:13:27]He's still there.

[00:13:29]Two life sentences, no release date, on a unit that a federal investigation found to be constitutionally inadequate, in a prison that was built on a plantation.

[00:13:41]Number five, Ivan Leon Brooks, 1990, Noxubee County, Mississippi.

[00:13:46]A three-year-old girl was found dead near a pond.

[00:13:49]She had been raped and murdered.

[00:13:52]The community was devastated.

[00:13:55]Law enforcement was under pressure to find someone responsible.

[00:13:59]They found Leon Brooks. Brooks was a black man from the same community, a neighbor, a familiar face, someone in proximity to the tragedy who fit the profile that investigators were looking for.

[00:14:12]He maintained his innocence from the moment of his arrest. He told anyone who would listen that he had not done what he was accused of doing.

[00:14:21]He said it clearly, consistently, and without the kind of equivocation that might suggest to uncertainty about his own involvement in his own life.

[00:14:29]The jury convicted him.

[00:14:31]He was sentenced to life in prison.

[00:14:34]He was sent to Parchman Farm. He spent 15 years at Parchman, 15 years of filing appeals, of maintaining his innocence, of watching the years that should have belonged to a free man pass inside a prison built on a former slave plantation in the Mississippi Delta.

[00:14:51]15 years of being a black man in a Mississippi prison for a crime he had not committed in a state where the specific history of wrongful convictions of black men for crimes against white victims is so extensive that researchers have documented it as a systematic pattern rather than a series of isolated failures.

[00:15:11]In 2001, another young girl was killed in similar circumstances in the same area. Kennedy Brewer, whose story comes next in this documentary, was already on death row for the earlier killing.

[00:15:23]Investigators eventually realized that the same man had committed both crimes.

[00:15:27]When DNA testing was applied to the biological evidence from both cases, the results matched a man named Justin Albert Johnson.

[00:15:36]Not Levon Brooks, not Kennedy Brewer.

[00:15:39]On February 15th, 2008, Levon Brooks walked out of Parchman Farm.

[00:15:44]He was exonerated. The charges against him were dismissed. He was free after 15 years.

[00:15:51]His father, Richard Brooks, said something after his son's exoneration that the Innocence Project has cited as one of the most precise descriptions of what wrongful convictions in America look like from the inside.

[00:16:06]He said, "They just wanted anybody."

[00:16:08]Three words. They encapsulate what it means to be a black man in Mississippi when law enforcement needs a conviction and a black man is nearby.

[00:16:18]Not the right person.

[00:16:20]Not a person connected to the crime by evidence.

[00:16:23]Anybody.

[00:16:24]Any black man in the vicinity who could be made to fit the shape of the crime that needed to be solved.

[00:16:31]Levon Brooks spent 15 years at Parchman for being anybody.

[00:16:34]He was exonerated. He went back to the town where he grew up.

[00:16:40]He is alive today. His 15 years are not returnable.

[00:16:43]Number four. Kennedy Brewer.

[00:16:46]He arrived on death row at Parchman in the early 1990s and spent 13 years waiting to be executed for a crime that DNA evidence eventually proved he had not committed.

[00:16:57]Kennedy Brewer was convicted of the 1992 rape and murder of his girlfriend's 3-year-old daughter in Noxubee County, Mississippi.

[00:17:06]The conviction rested heavily on bite mark analysis, a forensic discipline that had been presented in American courtrooms since the 1970s as scientifically reliable evidence capable of identifying specific individuals as the sources of specific bite marks on human skin.

[00:17:25]It is not reliable. The scientific community has known for years that bite mark analysis is fundamentally unreliable as individual identification evidence.

[00:17:35]That the claims made about its precision exceed what the underlying science can support.

[00:17:40]And that convictions built on bite mark testimony have produced wrongful convictions at a rate that makes it one of the most discredited forensic disciplines in modern jurisprudence.

[00:17:51]The bite marks on the 3-year-old child's body were presented by prosecutors as proof that Kennedy Brewer had committed the crime.

[00:17:59]The expert witness testified with the certainty that bite mark analysts routinely claimed in courtrooms across America.

[00:18:06]The jury convicted.

[00:18:09]The judge sentenced him to death.

[00:18:12]He arrived at Unit 29 Parchman's death row and waited.

[00:18:17]The cells were small.

[00:18:18]8 by 12 ft solitary confinement.

[00:18:22]No decoration permitted. The specific psychological architecture of death row applied to a man who had not committed the crime for which he was waiting to die.

[00:18:32]He had his faith.

[00:18:34]In the years after his exoneration, Brewer spoke at length about what it took to survive for 13 years on Parchman's death row.

[00:18:42]About the specific mental and spiritual discipline required to remain a recognizable person under conditions designed to strip personhood away.

[00:18:52]About the faith that he held as a kind of anchor against the specific dissolution that death row produces in human beings over years.

[00:19:01]In 2001, after Justin Albert Johnson was identified as the man who had killed another child in similar circumstances in the same area.

[00:19:10]Investigators went back to the biological evidence in both cases.

[00:19:14]DNA testing confirmed what Kennedy Brewer had been saying for 13 years. He had not committed the crime.

[00:19:21]The bite marks that had put him on death row were not bite marks.

[00:19:24]Subsequent examination determined they were insect marks.

[00:19:29]On March 10th, 2008, Kennedy Brewer was exonerated. He walked out of Parchman Farm after 13 years on death row.

[00:19:37]13 years in a cell 8 ft by 12 ft waiting for an execution date for a crime that insect marks and a discredited forensic discipline had attributed to him.

[00:19:48]He went back to the town where he grew up.

[00:19:51]He works at a chicken processing plant.

[00:19:54]He says he has tried to forget Parchman.

[00:19:57]He talks about faith.

[00:19:59]He doesn't dwell on the conditions he endured. He says only, "It's a rough place.

[00:20:05]You got to have a strong mind." 13 years on death row at one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere, exonerated by DNA, working at a chicken processing plant, trying to forget.

[00:20:18]The forensic analyst who testified that the bite marks on the child's body match Kennedy Brewer was not prosecuted.

[00:20:25]The bite mark discipline that produced his conviction is still used in American courtrooms.

[00:20:31]Parchman's death row is still housing men whose convictions rest on evidence that subsequent examination has questioned or discredited.

[00:20:40]What Kennedy Brewer's case tells you about the specific relationship between forensic science and racial justice in Mississippi, in the American South more broadly, is something that the exoneration alone cannot fully address.

[00:20:54]The exoneration means he was released.

[00:20:57]It does not mean the system that convicted him was reformed. It does not mean the forensic discipline that testified against him was removed from Mississippi courtrooms.

[00:21:07]It does not mean the specific vulnerability that produced his conviction, being a black man in Noxubee County, Mississippi, in the early 1990s, in proximity to a crime that investigators needed to solve, was addressed in any structural way.

[00:21:24]The Innocence Project and the National Registry of Exonerations have documented that black people are significantly more likely than white people to be wrongfully convicted of crimes, significantly more likely to spend longer periods incarcerated before exoneration, significantly more likely to be convicted on the basis of forensic evidence that is later discredited, or eyewitness testimony that is later recanted, or confessions that are later shown to have been coerced.

[00:21:55]Kennedy Brewer spent 13 years on death row.

[00:21:59]Justin Albert Johnson, the man who actually committed the crime, was eventually convicted.

[00:22:05]The system that imprisoned Brewer for 13 years has not produced a formal accounting of why it chose him, what the investigation missed, or what reforms would prevent the same choice from being made again.

[00:22:18]He works at a chicken processing plant.

[00:22:21]He tries to forget.

[00:22:24]You got to have a strong mind.

[00:22:27]Number three, Denoris Howell, January 3rd, 2020, Unit 29, Parchman Farm.

[00:22:35]The riots that had begun night of December 29th, 2019, were still going.

[00:22:41]Men in red and white striped uniforms, the specific pattern reserved for Parchman's most violent offenders, were moving freely through corridors where no correctional officers were present.

[00:22:54]Fires burned in mattresses that had been set alight.

[00:22:58]Contraband cell phone cameras documented smoke-filled pitch black hallways.

[00:23:04]Messages were being sent from inside unit 29 to relatives on the outside describing what was happening in real time.

[00:23:11]We are sleeping on concrete. There are no mats. Please try to help us.

[00:23:15]The Mississippi Department of Corrections had already announced the deaths of multiple inmates.

[00:23:21]The violence which officials described as gang-related though incarcerated men insisted that prison guards themselves, some of them gang members, helped instigated it, had consumed unit 29 in ways that no official statement was adequately capturing.

[00:23:39]Dennoris Howell was 36 years old. He was serving time at Parchman Farm.

[00:23:45]On January 3rd, 2020, he was found in his cell before 3:00 in the morning.

[00:23:51]He was covered in blood. He had a neck wound. He was the fifth inmate to die in the crisis that had begun on December 29th.

[00:23:59]His death was confirmed by the Mississippi Department of Corrections.

[00:24:03]His name appeared in the reporting on the crisis.

[00:24:06]And then, in the way that the names of black men who die in Mississippi prisons have always moved through the public record, his name began to fade.

[00:24:15]The Department of Corrections called the killings gang-related.

[00:24:19]It called individual deaths isolated incidents.

[00:24:23]It released statements that described the violence in bureaucratic language that obscured the specific horror of what was happening.

[00:24:31]Men being stabbed dozens of times.

[00:24:34]Men dying in cells with no running water and no electricity.

[00:24:38]A correctional officer who had allegedly given her keys to inmates and then quit when she was investigated. Dennoris Howell was 36 years old. He was found before 3:00 a.m. on January 3rd 2020 covered in blood with a neck wound in a cell at Parchman Farm.

[00:24:55]He was the fifth person to die in a crisis that would eventually produce 16 deaths before it ended.

[00:25:02]His family received no explanation that adequately accounted for what had happened to him.

[00:25:08]The Marshall Project, which has been investigating deaths inside Mississippi prisons for years, documented in 2025 that of the 42 people who died by homicide in Mississippi prisons over the past decade, the total convictions in those cases were essentially none.

[00:25:26]The killings happened, the investigations opened, the convictions did not follow. Denoris Howell is one of 42 names in that documented record of institutional failure. He died in a prison built on a slave plantation in a cell block that a federal investigation found to be constitutionally inadequate in a crisis that state officials had been warned about for years and had refused to fund the solutions for.

[00:25:51]He was 36 years old. His name was in the news for 3 days.

[00:25:56]Then it was gone.

[00:25:58]Number two.

[00:26:00]Anthony Wilson.

[00:26:02]He's not famous outside of the world that follows Parchman Farm.

[00:26:06]Anthony Wilson is an inmate at Parchman Farm's Unit 29.

[00:26:10]He's not on death row.

[00:26:12]He is serving time in maximum security.

[00:26:15]One of the roughly 1,500 men housed in a unit that was found by federal investigators to be in systematic violation of the constitutional rights of the people confined within it.

[00:26:27]He is not a person whose name appears in court records that made national news.

[00:26:32]He is not a wrongfully convicted man whose exoneration produced a press conference.

[00:26:37]He is a black man doing time at Parchman in a unit that the Department of Justice said was unsafe in a prison that was built on a slave plantation.

[00:26:48]What he did with that time is the reason he is on this list, Anthony Wilson wrote, "From inside Unit 29, he contributed to a literary anthology, a collection of writing by Parchman inmates compiled and published by editors outside the prison, part of an ongoing effort to document what incarceration at Parchman actually looks and feels and sounds like from the inside."

[00:27:12]His work appeared alongside that of other Unit 29 inmates in a collection that the Mississippi Public Broadcasting Network covered in 2025 as a document of what the MPB reporter described as Mississippi prison realism.

[00:27:27]The specific words Anthony Wilson used in his writing are the images, the observations, the precise language he found for the experience of living inside one of the most dangerous correctional environments in the United States, are documented in the MPB coverage of the anthology.

[00:27:45]He wrote of the environment that defines Unit 29, the rampant drug use, the exposure to the elements, the wanton violence.

[00:27:54]He wrote of what it does to a person's sense of themselves.

[00:27:59]The dehumanization so profound that inmates ask what proof they have that they are human at all, or whether God loves them.

[00:28:08]He wrote, "I'll never forget the sound of wood smashing flesh and hitting bone."

[00:28:13]That sentence is from his documented work. It is a sentence that contains in 12 words more information about what Unit 29 actually is than any DOJ report or journalism piece has managed to compress into 12 words.

[00:28:29]The sound.

[00:28:31]The specific acoustic texture of violence in an enclosed space, wood hitting flesh, flesh hitting bone, the memory of it, the impossibility of forgetting.

[00:28:43]Anthony Wilson is still at Parchman Farm. He is still writing, or was as of 2025 when his work appeared in the anthology and was covered by Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

[00:28:56]He is a black man doing time in a unit that federal investigators said violated the Constitution producing art that documents what that violation feels like from inside the body of a person experiencing it.

[00:29:10]He is not a public figure. He is not exonerated. He is not famous. He is a man in a cell at Parchman Farm who decided that the truth of what he was living through was worth writing down.

[00:29:22]Worth the risk of attention, worth the exposure, worth whatever the institution might decide to do with a man who was telling people on the outside what the inside actually looked like.

[00:29:35]His work is the closest thing available to a first-person account of what Parchman Farm's Unit 29 does to black men in real time.

[00:29:44]In the present tense, today.

[00:29:46]That is why he is number two.

[00:29:49]Number one, Curtis Flowers, 1996.

[00:29:53]Winona, Mississippi.

[00:29:55]Four people were killed at Tardy Furniture, a small furniture store on the main street of this small Mississippi town.

[00:30:02]The victims were shot at close range.

[00:30:05]The killer had gone through the store methodically.

[00:30:08]Bertha Tardy, the store owner, was killed.

[00:30:11]Three employees were killed alongside her.

[00:30:14]The killings were devastating to Winona.

[00:30:17]It was a small community.

[00:30:19]The victims were known. The crime was personal in the specific way that violence in small towns is always personal.

[00:30:26]Curtis Flowers was arrested on January 13th, 1997.

[00:30:31]He maintained his innocence. Over the next 22 years, the state of Mississippi tried Curtis Flowers six times for the same four murders.

[00:30:40]Six times.

[00:30:41]The same defendant.

[00:30:43]The same charges. Six trials.

[00:30:46]The first two trials produced convictions that were overturned on appeal because of prosecutorial misconduct by District Attorney Doug Evans.

[00:30:55]The specific documented pattern of Evans's conduct in the Flowers trials is the subject of the In the Dark podcast series produced by APM Reports.

[00:31:06]One of the most extensively researched and downloaded podcast investigations in American journalism history.

[00:31:14]The third trial produced a mistrial. The fourth and fifth trials ended in hung juries.

[00:31:19]The sixth trial in 2010 produced a conviction.

[00:31:24]Curtis Flowers went to Parchman Farm.

[00:31:27]He had already been there for the years between the earlier trial. Had spent the better part of two decades incarcerated at Parchman. Not convicted, not freed, simply held as the state of Mississippi continued to try him for the same crime over and over again. Using the same prosecutor who had been documented committing misconduct in the earlier trials.

[00:31:48]In 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States took his case.

[00:31:53]The specific issue before the court in Flowers versus Mississippi was the use of peremptory strikes.

[00:31:59]The prosecutor's removal of potential jurors without stated cause to exclude black jurors from Curtis Flowers trials.

[00:32:08]District Attorney Doug Evans had used peremptory strikes to remove black potential jurors in case after case across his career.

[00:32:17]In the six Flowers trials, Evans struck black jurors 41 times. He struck white jurors zero times.

[00:32:24]The Supreme Court reviewed that record in a seven to two ruling written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

[00:32:31]Not a justice historically associated with rulings favorable to criminal defendants or to arguments about racial bias in the legal system.

[00:32:41]The court found that the trial court had committed clear error in allowing Evans to remove a black juror in the sixth trial in circumstances that strongly suggested racial discrimination.

[00:32:53]The ruling sent the case back to Mississippi.

[00:32:57]The Mississippi Supreme Court eventually dismissed the charges against Curtis Flowers in September 2020.

[00:33:03]He was released. He'd been incarcerated on and off for 23 years.

[00:33:09]He had been tried six times. His case had reached the Supreme Court of the United States.

[00:33:15]Produced a significant ruling on the use of peremptory strikes in capital cases.

[00:33:20]Been the subject of one of the most listened to podcast series in American journalism history. And revealed a district attorney whose documented pattern of removing black jurors from capital cases.

[00:33:32]Represented something that seven Supreme Court justices found constitutionally unacceptable.

[00:33:38]Doug Evans, the district attorney who tried Curtis Flowers six times, who struck 41 black jurors across those trials while striking zero white jurors, was not prosecuted.

[00:33:51]He remained in office. He eventually chose not to seek re-election in 2019, the same year the Supreme Court took Flowers' case.

[00:33:58]Curtis Flowers is free. He was exonerated after 23 years.

[00:34:02]He lives in Winona, Mississippi.

[00:34:04]The same small town where furniture once stood where four people were killed in 1996.

[00:34:10]Where a district attorney spent 23 years trying to prove that the black man he had arrested was guilty by using a jury selection strategy that seven Supreme Court justices eventually found crossed the constitutional line.

[00:34:25]He is number one on this list not because his suffering was the greatest.

[00:34:29]Levon Brooks spent 15 years wrongfully imprisoned.

[00:34:33]Kennedy Brewer spent 13 years on death row for a crime proven by DNA to have been committed by someone else.

[00:34:41]Denoris Howell died in a cell at Parchman and no one was held accountable.

[00:34:46]It is not a competition. Curtis Flowers is number one because his case is the most complete answer to the question of what Parchman Farm actually is and always has been.

[00:34:56]Not just a brutal prison in a hot Delta county.

[00:34:59]Not just a facility that violates the Constitution as the DOJ found.

[00:35:04]Not just a slave plantation that was converted into a correctional institution with the same labor extraction model and the same racial logic.

[00:35:14]Parchman Farm is the end point of a system. The system begins with a law enforcement apparatus that in the specific documented history of Mississippi has looked at black men and seen not individuals but placeholders.

[00:35:28]Not the specific person who committed a specific crime but the category of person the system needs to fill the space where accountability is supposed to go.

[00:35:37]Curtis Flowers was tried six times by a prosecutor who removed 41 black jurors and zero white ones.

[00:35:44]Seven Supreme Court justices said that was wrong.

[00:35:47]23 years passed between his arrest and his freedom.

[00:35:52]The four people who died at Tardy Furniture in 1996 still do not have definitive justice.

[00:35:58]The man the state of Mississippi decided must be responsible spent 23 years at Parchman. His father visited him for 23 years of visiting days. They missed only a handful.

[00:36:09]He is free now. The system that put him there is still operating. Parchman Farm is still open.

[00:36:14]Doug Evans chose not to run for re-election.

[00:36:17]The pattern of black juror exclusion that his trials documented is still a feature of capital jury selection in Mississippi and in states across the country.

[00:36:27]The plantation built in 1901 is still producing what it was built to produce.

[00:36:32]The names in this documentary are seven points on a line that begins in 1901 and has not ended.

[00:36:39]Seven men, one prison, 124 years. Bukka White composed Parchman Farm Blues from inside the gates in the 1930s, and the warning in that music has been playing ever since.

[00:36:52]Derek Willis has spent 24 years on Unit 29 in conditions that a federal investigation found to be constitutionally inadequate.

[00:37:02]Levon Brooks spent 15 years at Parchman for a crime DNA proved he did not commit, and his father said, "They just wanted anybody."

[00:37:12]Kennedy Brewer spent 13 years on Parchman's death row because of bite mark evidence that subsequent examination found was actually insect marks, and walked out exonerated to work at a chicken processing plant and tried to forget.

[00:37:28]Denoris Howell was found before 3:00 a.m. on January 3rd, 2020, covered in blood with a neck wound in a Parchman cell, one of five men killed in a single week of violence that the state had been warned about for years.

[00:37:42]Anthony Wilson wrote from inside Unit 29, "I'll never forget the sound of wood smashing flesh and hitting bone."

[00:37:51]And Curtis Flowers was tried six times, had 41 black jurors struck from his trials by the same prosecutor, reached the Supreme Court of the United States, and spent 23 years at Parchman before the charges were finally dismissed.

[00:38:07]The Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm is still open.

[00:38:12]The DOJ found it unconstitutional.

[00:38:15]The state rebuilt portions of it.

[00:38:17]The population is still 70% black.

[00:38:20]The land it sits on was once a cotton plantation.

[00:38:24]The founding principles on which it was built, profit, armed inmate guards, corporal punishment, have been formally abandoned.

[00:38:32]The institution they produced has not.

[00:38:35]Drop a comment.

[00:38:37]Tell us which story you had not heard before today.

[00:38:40]Subscribe to Doctor Me Is Who because the stories that matter are the ones nobody else is telling.