Clarence Thomas thinks a podcast is a big reason this death row case got reversed

The Flowers v. Mississippi Supreme Court case has an outsized media following, and Justice Clarence Thomas thinks that majorly influenced its outcome.

On Friday, the court announced it reached a 7-2 decision to overturn the death row conviction of Curtis Flowers, saying racial discrimination played a role in his jury's selection across previous trials. Yet in his dissenting opinion, Thomas wrote that the court likely only heard the case because it "has received a fair amount of media attention," namely from the viral American Public Media podcast In The Dark.

The APM podcast spent months investigating Flowers' case, in which a white prosecutor had tried the black defendant six times for the murder of four people in Mississippi. The prosecutor had consistently used his peremptory strikes to remove black candidates from the jury pool, leading Flowers to face all-white and nearly all-white juries in every trial. The majority determined that racial discrimination played a role in these strikes and found them unconstitutional.

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Thomas, the court's only black justice, meanwhile authored a scathing dissent that criticized the media as much as his colleagues, suggesting the justices just furthered the idea that "this court gives closer scrutiny to cases with significant media attention."

Thomas went on to write that if the majority opinion "has one redeeming quality," it's that "the state is perfectly free to convict Curtis Flowers again."