Supreme Court Rules 5-4 in Favor of Black Death Row Inmate Who Said Racial Bias Shaped His Jury — Lower Court Must Now Reconsider

The Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of a Black death row inmate, identified as Terry Pitchford, who alleged racial bias in jury selection that led to his conviction.

According to court documents, two Black teenagers — Terry Pitchford and Eric Bullins — robbed a grocery store in Grenada, Mississippi, in 2004, during which Bullins fatally shot the store owner.

Bullins, who was 16 at the time, reached a plea agreement and received a 20-year sentence, while Pitchford, who was 18, was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.

According to court documents, the prosecutor, identified as Doug Evans, "used peremptory strikes against four of the five black potential jurors" during jury selection at Pitchford’s trial. The Associated Press reported that Evans, who is now retired, had a history of excusing Black jurors for discriminatory reasons.

The case is based on a Supreme Court rule, Batson v. Kentucky, which says jurors cannot be removed based on their race.

The document stated that in Batson and subsequent cases, "the Court has spelled out a three-step process for a trial court to determine whether a prosecutor employed a peremptory challenge based on race."

For step one, defense counsel objected under Batson and argued that the strikes against the four Black jurors were racially motivated.

For step two, Evans offered the trial court race-neutral reasons for striking each of the four black potential jurors. He argued that "one had returned 15 minutes late to court, two others had brothers convicted of violent offenses, and the fourth, like Pitchford, was young, unmarried, and a father."

The trial court, in response, declared each strike to be race-neutral and "pivoted immediately to the defense's peremptory strikes."

"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," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the court's majority opinion.

When Pitchford’s attorney sought to raise the Batson issue again, following the jury selection, the trial court twice cut him off and "ended the inquiry before counsel could try to rebut as pretextual the race-neutral reasons articulated by the prosecution."

Pitchford then filed a motion for a new trial and "advanced the argument he was prevented from making during jury selection" — that "the prosecution’s state of mind was clear as it deselected Black people from the jury panel who had the same familial, living, social or marital circumstances as whites who were not deselected, which is a clear violation of Batson.'"

However, his motion was denied, and he spent the last 20 years in prison, where he "pursued appellate and collateral challenges to his conviction and death sentence."

The Mississippi Supreme Court sided with the trial court — but a federal district court later found the state court had "unreasonably applied Batson" and had incorrectly ruled that Pitchford had waived his objection. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit then reversed that finding, before the case reached the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Pitchford's favor — remanding the case to a lower court to reexamine his Batson claims, which could ultimately affect his conviction and death sentence.