The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of Terry Pitchford, a Black man sentenced to death in Mississippi for capital murder, who asserted that racial bias affected his conviction.
The Court voted 5‑4 to side with Pitchford.
Pitchford, who is now 40, was 18 at the time of the 2004 grocery store robbery in which his teenage accomplice, who was also a minor and therefore exempt from the death penalty, fired the fatal shots. Pitchford was convicted of capital murder and received a death sentence.
The Supreme Court’s decision centered on jury selection in Pitchford’s case, where state prosecutors excluded four of the five Black jurors, resulting in a jury of 11 white jurors and a single Black juror that ultimately convicted Pitchford and imposed a death sentence.
The former prosecutor Doug Evans, who the Associated Press reports has a history of dismissing Black jurors for discriminatory reasons, excused the four remaining Black jurors. Pitchford’s attorney objected to these strikes during the trial, but Judge Joseph Loper permitted them.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion that the trial court did not give Pitchford’s counsel a sufficient opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s race‑neutral explanations for striking the four Black jurors and never decided whether those explanations were merely pretextual.
The Supreme Court’s ruling reinstates a federal judge’s decision that vacated Pitchford’s conviction, finding that his attorney was barred from challenging the claim that Evans’s jury selection was racially motivated.
During oral arguments in March, several Supreme Court justices expressed doubt that Judge Loper had adequately applied a Batson challenge—a 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky that holds it unconstitutional to exclude Black jurors based on race.
A Batson challenge initiates a three‑step process: the challenger must first present evidence of a discrimination inference; the prosecutor then must provide race‑neutral reasons for excusing specific jurors; and the judge ultimately decides whether intentional discrimination occurred.
Much of the oral arguments centered on Judge Loper’s conduct during the third step of the Batson challenge.
Seven years earlier, in a separate case also involving Loper and Evans, the Supreme Court overturned the death sentence and conviction of Curtis Flowers, a Black man who had been tried six times over more than two decades. At that time, seven of the nine current justices sat on the bench, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed that Evans had pursued a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.”
Prosecutors have indicated they may seek to retry Pitchford.