After 6 Murder Trials and 23 Years Behind Bars, Curtis Flowers Is Set Free

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The scope of good news that makes Recharge is expansive, from stories of justice achieved to the brightening, heartening, surprising boosts from the archives, like Dorothea Lange’s photos getting digitized, Satchel Paige’s life advice revisited (from our second-ever magazine), and Pharoahe Monch’s truth-telling returned to. Then there’s the genre of good that is essentially bad interrupted, or atrocity halted; when injustice is intervened on late, like wrongly prosecuted people no longer prosecuted, decades after irreversible harm accumulates.

My colleague Venu Gupta messaged me with a story of exactly this kind. An innocent man, Curtis Flowers, tried six times on murder changes and incarcerated for 23 years before the case was dropped. “How have we come to a point where we caused so much pain to someone and feel like the end of that pain is a celebration?” Venu asked. What does it say about the world “that a man who was not guilty and spent decades in jail after six trials was then found not guilty”?

Read the full story by Mother Jones and by the Mississippi Center for Justice’s tireless, heroic leaders (here and here), and share more goodness like it, and all forms of recharges, at recharge@motherjones.com. Also share the Recharge blog at motherjones.com/recharge with one person who might want or need it today.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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