I'm Elizabeth Lattery and welcome to Scotus 101, where we break down what's happening at the Supreme Court, what the justices are up to, and other things related to our favorite branch of government.

This week, I'm joined by Sheldon Gilbert of the National Constitution Center, and we'll talk about planking for RBG, Clarence Thomas, speaking, and I also recently sat down with the Oklahoma Solicitor General, Mithin, Mansinghoney.

Sheldon, welcome back to SCOTUS 101 once again.

Thanks. I'm so excited to listen to your interview with Miffin. He's fantastic.

He is. So let's talk about a couple of Scotus headlines of the week. Fans were planking at the court to celebrate RBG's birthday. Last week marked the Justice's 86th birthday and a group of fans showed up outside the court to plank in her honor. Her longtime trainer was on hand for the event and revealed that the notorious RBG is back in the gym after recuperating from her surgery in December.

So here's wishing Justice Ginsburg a belated happy birthday.

Moving on to another SCOTUS headline, Justice Clarence Thomas speaks.

The court heard oral argument in a number of cases this week.

The most noteworthy is Florida versus Mississippi.

The case was already gaining attention because it's the subject of a podcast, season two of In the Dark, which is a pretty great podcast if listeners haven't heard of it.

But then Justice Thomas asked a question at the oral argument.

So that raised the case's profile even more.

So by way of background, the case stems from the 1996 murder of four people at a furniture

store in Winona, Mississippi. Curtis Flowers, who had recently been fired from the store,

was charged with the murders, and over the past 23 years, he's been tried six times, which just blows my mind

when I, you know, when I read about this case. So the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned his

conviction and death sentence following several of those trials for prosecutorial misconduct.

Throughout the six trials, the prosecutor, district attorney Doug Evans, used peremptory strikes to remove the majority

of prospective jurors who were black. Looking at all six trials, Evans struck 41 of 42 prospective

black jurors. So under the Supreme Court's 1986 ruling in Batson v. Kentucky, a prosecutor may

not base a peremptory strike on race.

So at the argument this week, a number of the justices seemed troubled by the history of this

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