The Supreme Court handed down a major ruling Thursday in favor of Mississippi death row inmate Terry Pitchford.
The nation’s highest court ruled in a narrow 5 to 4 decision that he was not given a fair opportunity to challenge the prosecution’s removal of black jurors during his trial.
The Supreme Court, in Pitchford v. Cain, overturned Pitchford’s conviction for capital murder and his death sentence, sending the case back to Mississippi for the prosecution to decide whether to retry him.
The odd alliance underscored the increasing instability of Supreme Court alignments, especially in the areas of criminal procedure and jury-selection issues.
The justices in the minority were Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett who said the lower courts had gotten the case right and the conviction should have been upheld.
The case centers on jury selection practices and the Supreme Court’s longstanding precedent in Batson v. Kentucky, the 1986 decision barring prosecutors from using peremptory strikes to remove potential jurors solely on the basis of race.
The controversy relates to a Mississippi murder case that took place over two decades ago. Pitchford, then 18, and Eric Bullins, then 16, robbed a grocery store in Grenada, Miss. in 2004.
Prosecutors said Bullins was the one who shot and killed the store’s white owner, Reuben Britt, during the crime.
Bullins was not eligible for the death penalty because he was a juvenile at the time of the offense, under constitutional standards governing juvenile offenders.
He was eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison. Pitchford, however, was charged with capital murder and sentenced to death after his conviction.
The Supreme Court’s latest ruling does not address whether he is guilty or innocent, but rather whether the trial court properly considered allegations that black jurors were improperly excluded from the jury in violation of Batson.
The controversy erupted during jury selection when then-District Attorney Doug Evans used peremptory challenges to strike four of the five black potential jurors left in the jury pool.
Two prospective jurors had brothers convicted of violent crimes and another was said to share demographic characteristics with Pitchford, including being young, unmarried and a parent. One prospective juror came back late from a lunch break.
Pitchford’s attorneys fought the strikes under the Supreme Court’s Batson framework.
As a result, the defense initially claims an inference of discrimination, the prosecutor thereafter offers race-neutral reasons, and the defense can then argue that such reasons are simply pretextual, serving as a cover for unlawful discrimination.
The problem was not necessarily with the reasons Evans gave, but whether the trial court properly followed through with the Batson process. The majority of the Supreme Court justices concluded that the trial judge had accepted the explanations of the prosecutor and had gone ahead without giving the defense a fair chance to contest them before the jury was empaneled.
Pitchford was ultimately convicted by a jury of 11 White jurors and one Black juror.
Pitchford has filed a petition in the Mississippi Supreme Court and is seeking relief in the federal district court in Mississippi.
A federal court agreed, ordering the conviction overturned and finding that the trial judge was “seemingly eager to get to the case itself, quickly deemed the reasons to be race-neutral and moved on.”
However, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court and sent Pitchford back to death row.
The Supreme Court then agreed to hear the case. “In this case, whether it was confusion, oversight, a rush of the jury-selection process, or something else, things broke down, and the normal trial court procedure for resolving Batson claims at step three never occurred, despite repeated efforts by Pitchford’s counsel to pursue and preserve the Batson objection,” Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.
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