Mississippi defense team receives human rights award after man freed from prison

Updated: Nov 14, 2020 / 09:50 AM CST

FILE – In this Monday, Dec. 16, 2019 file photo, Curtis Flowers speaks with reporters as he exits the Winston-Choctaw Regional Correctional Facility in Louisville, Miss. Mississippi’s new attorney general must decide whether to take a quadruple murder case to a seventh trial. Curtis Flowers has had two mistrials and four reversed convictions in connection with the 1996 slayings of four people at a furniture store. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — The defense team for a man who was freed from prison in December after more than 20 years has won a human rights award.

The Curtis Flowers defense team includes the George C. Cochran Innocence Project at the University of Mississippi. The team won The Southern Center for Human Rights‘ 2020 Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award.

Curtis Flowers was convicted multiple times in a slaying and robbery at a small-town furniture store in 1996.

The U.S. Supreme Court threw out the most recent conviction in June 2019, citing racial bias in jury selection. All charges against Flowers were dropped in September.