Death row inmate wins Supreme Court duel over racial discrimination on Mississippi jury

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man on Mississippi’s death row on Thursday, allowing his capital conviction to be challenged based on discrimination during jury selection.

Terry Pitchford says the state’s prosecutor unconstitutionally struck Black jurors at his trial. But a state court held that Pitchford’s lawyer failed to adequately defend and therefore forfeited his Batson claim — which allows defendants to challenge the exclusion of a potential juror based on their race, ethnicity, sex or other protected characteristic.

Thursday’s divided ruling from the Supreme Court reversed, holding that Pitchford’s lawyer wasn’t given a proper opportunity to make such arguments.

“The trial court did not afford Pitchford’s counsel a sufficient opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s proffered race-neutral reasons for striking the four Black jurors and never determined whether the prosecutor’s stated reasons were pretextual,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote for the majority.

Under Batson v. Kentucky, courts use a three-step process requiring defense attorneys to present preliminary evidence of intentional racial discrimination, allowing prosecutors to offer a race-neutral explanation and requiring the court to consider all available information.

“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.

Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, two Barack Obama appointees and a Joe Biden appointee respectively, joined Kavanaugh in the majority.

Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented, claiming the majority’s conclusions were not supported by the trial court records.

“Mr. Pitchford’s account of a muzzled defense team is hard to square with the record,” wrote Gorsuch, another Trump appointee. “But even if it were a plausible account, that still would not be enough … a federal habeas petitioner must show not only that his version of events is plausible. He must show that the record ‘compel[s]’ it.”

Joining Gorsuch’s dissent were Justices Clarence Thomas, a George H.W. Bush appointee, Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, and Amy Coney Barrett, another Trump appointee.

At 18, Pitchford was sentenced to death for his participation in a fatal 2004 robbery that killed a local grocer. Reuben Britt, the store owner of Crossroads Grocery, was shot three times by Pitchford’s accomplice, Eric Bullins. Pitchford says he fired nonlethal pellets into the floor, but prosecutors charged him with capital murder, claiming he believed the .38 caliber revolver was loaded with lethal ammunition.

During the trial, prosecutors struck four of the five potential Black jurors without any voir dire examination. The prosecutor in Pitchford’s case, former District Attorney Doug Evans, has already faced Supreme Court scrutiny over his efforts to exclude Black jurors while trying Curtis Flowers six times for the same crime. In 2019, the high court overturned Flowers’ death sentence and conviction, and Evans resigned as district attorney in 2023.

As Pitchford’s lawyer before the Supreme Court pushed to correct the trial court’s failures in March, the justices harshly scrutinized whether his previous defense attorney put up enough of a fight during jury selection.

But Kavanaugh’s short nine-page opinion focused on the trial judge’s error.

“As this court has stated, ‘America’s trial judges operate at the front lines of American justice,’ and ‘the job of enforcing Batson rests first and foremost with trial judges,’” Kavanaugh wrote, quoting his majority opinion in Flowers’ case.

Kavanaugh conceded that Pitchford’s attorney should have been more assertive, but he said the Mississippi Supreme Court’s holding was unreasonable.

“The Mississippi trial court explicitly assured Pitchford’s counsel that the Batson objection was preserved,” Kavanaugh wrote. “When Pitchford’s counsel attempted to raise Batson again after the prosecutor’s race-neutral explanations for the four peremptory strikes of black jurors, the trial court responded: ‘I think you already made those, and they are clear in the record.’”

Gorsuch claimed his colleagues’ ruling ignored constraints under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. But that error, the dissent claimed, limited any negative impact of the decision moving forward.

“If the court’s decision is mistaken, at least its impact is limited,” Gorsuch wrote. “Precisely because so many of our AEDPA precedents go unmentioned, I do not read today’s decision as calling any of them into question.”

Pitchford’s case will return to the lower court for further proceedings.

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