The US supreme court on Thursday ruled in favor of Terry Pitchford, a Black man convicted of capital murder and on death row in Mississippi, who claimed that his conviction was due to the jury having racial bias.
The justices sided with Pitchford in a 5-4 vote.
Pitchford, now 40, was just 18 when he and another teen robbed a grocery store in 2004. The other teen, who fired fatal shots, was still a minor and ineligible for the death penalty, but Pitchford was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.
The focus of the supreme court ruling was on jury selection in Pitchford’s case, when state prosecutors removed four out of five Black jurors. A jury composed of 11 white jurors and one Black juror would later convict Pitchford and sentence him to death.
The now retired prosecutor Doug Evans, who the Associated Press notes had a history of dismissing Black jurors for discriminatory reasons, had excused the four other Black jurors. Pitchford’s attorney objected to the strikes during the trial, but the judge, Joseph Loper, allowed them.
“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 wrote in the court’s majority opinion.
During oral arguments in March, several supreme court justices appeared skeptical of whether Loper had sufficiently applied a Batson challenge, which refers to a 1986 ruling in Batson v Kentucky, in which the court reaffirmed that it is unconstitutional to keep Black people off juries due to their race.
A Batson challenge triggers a three-step process in which the objecting party must first show that there is an inference of discrimination. The striking party must then show reasonable, race-neutral explanations for striking certain jurors. The judge later determines whether there was purposeful discrimination.
Much of the oral arguments focused on Loper’s actions in the third step of the challenge.
Seven years ago, in a case that also involved Loper, Mississippi’s highest court and Evans, the supreme court overturned the death sentence and conviction of Curtis Flowers, a Black man who had been tried six times dating back more than 20 years. At that time, the supreme court had seven of the nine current justices. Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative justice, wrote that Evans showed a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals”.
