In 1997, Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Winona, Mississippi, was arrested for the murder of four people at a local furniture store. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. In the two decades that followed, Flowers was tried five more times for the same crime. Each time, his trial ended with a hung jury or the conviction was reversed on appeal, and the prosecutor pursued the case again. In 2017, a small team of public-radio reporters began looking into the case, examining the exceptional number of reversals and the decision by the district attorney to continue bringing it to trial. What was the evidence for Flowers’s guilt, and did it hold up under scrutiny? What the reporters discovered ignited a national response.
Flowers’s extraordinary story came to widespread attention on “In the Dark,” an investigative podcast hosted by Madeleine Baran and created by APM Reports. After the second season, which The New Yorker’s podcast critic, Sarah Larson, named the best podcast of 2018, revealed prosecutorial misconduct at the heart of the trials, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Flowers’s conviction. In 2020, all charges were dismissed, and Curtis Flowers was a free man.
“In the Dark,” the winner of two Peabody Awards and a George Polk Award, among other accolades, is now joining The New Yorker and Condé Nast Entertainment to produce and distribute its third season. Writers and editors from the magazine will also collaborate with members of the “In the Dark” team, including Baran, the lead reporter, and Samara Freemark, the managing producer, to develop new narrative series. The partnership marks the magazine’s most ambitious foray into long-form audio journalism, and will add to New Yorker audio offerings, which include The New Yorker Radio Hour and a stable of podcasts.
While the next season of “In the Dark” is in production, you can catch up on all previous episodes wherever you get your podcasts. These include the first season, about the kidnapping and murder of Jacob Wetterling, an eleven-year-old from Minnesota, whose disappearance went unsolved for nearly twenty-seven years. Flowers’s legal odyssey is recounted in Season 2, which also examines the methods and motivations of the white prosecutor who spent more than twenty years prosecuting the case. And “Coronavirus in the Delta,” a limited-run series produced by “In the Dark,” explores how the pandemic affected life in rural Mississippi, and is told through the voices of local medical professionals, clergy members, prisoners, and others.
Follow “In the Dark” wherever you get your podcasts to hear each season in its entirety. And, to be notified about Season 3, sign up to receive The New Yorker’s weekly Podcasts newsletter.