Washington — The Supreme Court delivered a pivotal decision on Thursday, siding with a Black death row inmate from Mississippi who claimed racial bias influenced the jury selection process during his trial.
In a closely split decision of 5-4, the court ruled in favor of Terry Pitchford. Notably, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s liberal justices in the majority. Justice Kavanaugh penned the majority opinion in the case, identified as Pitchford v. Cain.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett expressed their dissent.
The case originated from a 2004 incident in Grenada, Mississippi, where two Black teenagers, Pitchford and Eric Bullins, were involved in a robbery at a grocery store. The store owner, a White man named Reuben Britt, was shot and killed in the attack. Bullins, who fired the fatal shots, was 16 at the time and therefore ineligible for the death penalty, resulting in a 20-year prison sentence for him.
Pitchford, who was 18 during the crime, faced charges of capital murder, with the state pursuing the death penalty.
During the jury selection in the Mississippi state court, then-District Attorney Doug Evans exercised a peremptory strike to dismiss four out of five potential Black jurors. Pitchford’s defense challenged this action, invoking the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky. This landmark ruling prohibits the exclusion of potential jurors based on race and outlines a specific framework for courts to evaluate whether such peremptory strikes are racially motivated.
Evans provided several reasons for excluding the four Black potential jurors in Pitchford’s case, arguing that one returned 15 minutes late to court from a lunch break, two others had brothers convicted of violent crimes and the fourth was similar to Pitchford in that he was young, unmarried and a father.
The trial judge accepted these reasons as race-neutral. But Pitchford’s lawyers argued they were not given the chance to rebut the prosecutors’ reasons as pretextual, as required under Batson’s three-step framework.
A jury composed of 11 White jurors and one Black juror ultimately convicted Pitchford of capital murder and sentenced him to death.
Evans also served as the top prosecutor in the high-profile case of Curtis Flowers, whose murder conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2019. Evans was accused of consistently striking prospective Black jurors from the jury pool.
Pitchford first appealed his conviction and death sentence to the Mississippi Supreme Court, and then sought relief from the federal district court in Mississippi. That court ruled in favor of Pitchford and overturned his conviction.
“The trial court, seemingly eager to proceed to the case itself, quickly deemed the reasons as race-neutral and moved on,” the district court found.
That decision was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. But in its ruling, the Supreme Court sided with Pitchford, invalidating his conviction. He can be retried by the state.
“In this case, whether due to confusion, oversight, an overly hurried jury selection process, or some other cause, things broke down, and the ordinary trial-court procedure for resolving Batson claims at step three never occurred — notwithstanding the repeated efforts of Pitchford’s counsel to pursue and preserve the Batson objection,” Kavanaugh wrote.
In a dissenting opinion, Gorsuch argued that Pitchford failed to clear the high bar for securing relief under federal law.
The court’s opinion, he said, “errs on the law and the factual record alike.” Still, Gorsuch wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision is a narrow one, applying only to Pitchford.
