Supreme Court Rules for Man on Mississippi Death Row in Racial Bias Case

The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in favor of Terry Pitchford, a Black man sentenced to death in Mississippi after an infamous prosecutor with a long history of racial discrimination struck all but one Black person from his jury.

In a 5-4 decision by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Court upheld the lower court's decision to vacate Mr. Pitchford's conviction because he was denied the opportunity to challenge the prosecutor's strikes as racially biased.

"Things Broke Down"

Terry Pitchford (now 40) was just 18 in 2004, when he and another Black teenager, Eric Bullins, went to rob a grocery store near Grenada, Mississippi. The white store owner was killed when Eric shot him three times with a pistol, while Terry fired into the floor.

Eric was not eligible for the death penalty because he was 16 at the time. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Terry Pitchford was charged as an accomplice with capital murder in Grenada County, which was 40% Black at the time. Forty Black residents reported for jury service; five were excused for statutory cause; and 30 were excused for cause primarily because of their views on the death penalty.

Of the remaining five Black prospective jurors, the prosecution used peremptory strikes to remove four, leaving only one Black person on Mr. Pitchford's jury.

Defense counsel objected under Batson v. Kentucky, which set out a three-step process for determining whether the prosecution has engaged in illegal racial discrimination in jury selection.

The trial court found that the defendant made a prima facie showing that the peremptory strikes were based on race (step one) and required the prosecutor to give race-neutral reasons for the challenged strikes (step two).

At step three, "defense counsel must at least have an opportunity to argue that the asserted race-neutral reasons were not the actual reasons-that is, the reasons were pretextual." But in this case, the trial court ended the analysis at step two and denied the Batson challenge without allowing the defense to show that the reasons were pretexts for discrimination.

The nearly all-white jury found Mr. Pitchford guilty on February 8, 2006, and sentenced him to death the next day.

On appeal, Mr. Pitchford argued that the State illegally discriminated against Black prospective jurors in violation of Batson. The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected his claim because it said his lawyers had failed to rebut the prosecutor's reasons.

In 2023, the federal district court granted federal habeas relief, explaining that the record shows defense counsel tried to argue pretext, but the trial court cut them off and gave them no chance to rebut the State's reasons.

Because the trial court "full-stop ended its Batson analysis" at step two and never proceeded to step three, the federal court vacated Mr. Pitchford's conviction and death sentence and remanded for a new trial. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed and Mr. Pitchford sought review in the Supreme Court.

The Court agreed that the Mississippi trial court never conducted the essential third step of the Batson inquiry. As Justice Kavanaugh explained:

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.

Because the trial court denied Mr. Pitchford's counsel a sufficient opportunity to rebut the prosecutor's reasons for striking the four Black jurors, the Court reversed the Fifth Circuit and remanded for a new trial.

"We Cannot Ignore That History"

This is the second case in which the Supreme Court has vacated a capital conviction based on a Batson claim against District Attorney Doug Evans.

In 2019, the Court reversed the conviction of Curtis Flowers, a Black man who was tried six times for the same offense in Winona, Mississippi, in 1996. In the six trials combined, Evans struck 41 of the 42 Black prospective jurors he could have struck.

"The numbers speak loudly," Justice Kavanaugh wrote in the 7-2 decision reversing the state court. "The State's relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few Black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury."

At the sixth trial, Evans removed five of six Black prospective jurors. Like Mr. Pitchford, Mr. Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury of 11 white people.

Justice Kavanaugh admonished the Mississippi Supreme Court in Flowers for failing to consider Evans's extensive record of racially biased jury selection in the case. "We cannot ignore that history," he wrote. "We cannot take that history out of the case."

The district court in Mr. Pitchford's case agreed. This "troubling case history…by the same district attorney in the same judicial district" was well known when Mr. Pitchford's case reached the Mississippi Supreme Court, the district court found, and it should have been examined by the state appellate court as part of the "totality of the circumstances" analysis required by Batson.

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