Curtis Flowers has been tried six times for the same crime — the brutal execution-style killings of four people at Winona's Tardy Furniture store in 1996.

His trials have been tainted by alleged racial discrimination and prosecutorial misconduct.

UPDATE:Supreme Court frowns on racial jury tactics of Mississippi DA in Curtis Flowers trials

He has been spotlighted by an investigative true crime podcast.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court will hear his case Wednesday.

Flowers, by the accounts of his family and friends, was an ordinary guy with no prior criminal history who loved singing in his gospel group before an indictment upended his life.

His odyssey through the criminal justice system, however, has been anything but normal.

"This case has been extraordinary from the start," said Stephen Bright, who teaches at Yale Law School and has argued similar cases before the Supreme Court. "....I think the (Supreme) Court here is probably intrigued by the fact you have six trials. That you have this history by the prosecutor. So it's a very unique case."

What is focus of the Supreme Court appeal?

The heart of the issue: Whether Montgomery District Attorney Doug Evans and his office purposefully excluded black citizens from serving in the jury in Flowers' most recent trial because of their race.

For more than 20 years, Flowers has been behind bars. The 48-year-old is being held at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman prison.

Legally speaking, Flowers is also trapped in a limbo of sorts.

Three of his guilty verdicts have been overturned, but he has never been acquitted of the quadruple homicide; therefore, the prohibition on double jeopardy, or being prosecuted twice for the same offense, does not apply.

Six trials resulted in four guilty verdicts in furniture store killings

On the morning of July 16, 1996, Tardy Furniture's owner and three employees were found lying in pools of blood. Each had been shot in the head, and nearly $400 was missing from the cash drawer.

The victims were Bertha Tardy, 59, Carmen Rigby, 45, Roberty Golden, 42, and 16-year-old Derrick Stewart, who was known as "Bobo." All were dead at the scene, except for Derrick, who fought for his life for several days until he succumbed to his injuries.

The evidence investigators gathered at the scene included a bloody footprint and bullets.

Between 1997 and 2010, Flowers was tried six times for the killings. Prosecutors painted Flowers as a disgruntled employee who wanted revenge because his paycheck had been withheld to offset merchandise he damaged.

Four times a jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to death.

Three of those convictions were shot down by the Mississippi Supreme Court because justices found Evans committed serious errors when prosecuting Flowers, including improperly trying all four murders when a trial was intended only for one count, misstating the facts during a closing argument and racial discrimination during jury selection.

In two of the six trials, juries could not unanimously decide whether Flowers was guilty or innocent so judges declared them mistrials.

Every time Evans failed to secure a lasting conviction for Flowers, he decided to retry him.

Flowers' fourth guilty verdict, from his 2010 trial, was — for the first time — upheld by the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2014. For now, Flowers, in the eyes of the law, is guilty of the quadruple homicide that shook Winona more than two decades ago.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision could change that.

Was the state Supreme Court correct on question of prejudice in jury selection?

The question the high court is being presented is whether the state Supreme Court correctly applied a ruling from the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court case Batson v. Kentucky.

In Batson v. Kentucky, the court determined it was unconstitutional to exclude someone from a jury because of race or gender.

Jury selection works like this: A judge will eliminate people from the jury pool who have clear biases or conflicts of interest. Then, prosecutors and defense attorneys will take turns removing, or striking, potential jurors. In Mississippi capital trials, each side has 12 strikes.

Twice before judges have found Evans eliminated black potential jurors because of their race, which is unconstitutional.

In explaining its decision to reverse one of Flowers' prior convictions, the Mississippi Supreme Court wrote: "...(this) case presents us with as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge..."

Cornell Law School professor John Blume said Evans' history of using racially discriminatory tactics in jury selection likely will be a key part of Flowers' attorneys argument.

"A big piece of this is, if you've done this twice before, the chance you're not being candid about it this time is also quite high," Blume said.

Evans did not respond to a Clarion Ledger request for comment. The Mississippi Attorney General's Office, which is helping with his case, declined to speak, citing pretrial publicity rules.

On the other side, attorneys for Flowers also declined to talk about the case before the oral arguments.

APM Reports, the news organization behind "In The Dark," a podcast which spent a year investigating Flowers' case, looked into the racial composition of the six trials' juries.

There were a total of 72 jurors in Flowers' trials. Sixty-one were white and they all voted for guilt. Eleven were black, five of whom voted for guilt.

APM Reports pointed out that the juries that reached guilty verdicts were all white or nearly all white. The juries that could not come to a decision had a higher percentage of black jurors.

APM Reports looked at Evans' career as district attorney, beyond the Flowers trials.

Between 1992 and 2017, Evans struck black potential jurors at more than four times the rate of white potential jurors, an APM Report analysis concluded.

Chris Kemmitt, lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, said "everything that (Evans) has done screams discrimination."

Striking black jurors is “a remnant of Jim Crow that has survived until 2019," Kemmitt said.

What will happen at the U.S. Supreme Court?

On Wednesday, each side will get a half hour to make its case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court will likely issue an opinion sometime before the third week of June, when the term ends, he said.

Briefs filed by both sides outline their stances.

Flowers attorneys are expected to point to the number of questions prosecutors asked of each potential juror, Blume said.

While Evans asked white potential jurors "virtually no questions" during the selection process, he questioned black potential jurors at length, said the Cornell law professor.

It's Flowers' defense team's stance that Evans did that so he could find an excuse that's not race related to strike black potential jurors.

"It suggests his motive wasn't really to find jurors that weren't biased, but to get rid of black jurors," Blume said.

The state is expected to argue that the jurors struck were eliminated for legitimate, non-race reasons.

"They will mostly say that the white jurors that he didn't strike were different from the black jurors he did strike, who had connections to Mr. Flowers' family ... or showed other signs there were reasons a prosecutor might not have wanted them to serve on Mr. Flowers' case," Blume said.

Blume said the Supreme Court will be making a decision on a "relatively narrow issue."

One way the outcome could have some significance beyond the Flowers case is the recognition that history matters, he said.

"When you're trying to decide if someone discriminated in jury selection, you don't look at just one trial, you look at all of an individuals' actions," he said.

How could this impact Flowers' case?

There are three possible outcomes, said Blume.

Scenario one — justices could find that Evans did discriminate against jurors on the basis of race. In that case, the decision would be vacated and Flowers would be back to "square one," according to Bright, who teaches at Yale.

That would mean it's up to Evans to decide whether to retry Flowers. Another trial seems likely given Evans' past actions, Bright said.

Scenario two — the U.S. Supreme Court agrees with the Mississippi Supreme Court that there was no racial discrimination during jury selection. The conviction would stand.

From there, Flowers' attorneys could pursue other appeal options, including state post conviction and federal habeas corpus.

"There's still a long long road ahead before state would be in a position to carry out the sentence in the case," Bright said.

Scenario three — Justices could reverse the decision of the state Supreme Court and ask for state justices to look at the jury discrimination issue again.

Scenario three is possible, but the likelihood of that happening?

"I would say no way, whatsoever," Bright said.

USA Today reporter Richard Wolf contributed to this report.

Contact Alissa Zhu at azhu@gannett.com. Follow @AlissaZhu on Twitter.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated how each side will have to present its argument at the U.S. Supreme Court. The hearing list shows Curtis Flowers' case is set for one hour total of argument.