Supreme Court to review Mississippi case on alleged omission of Black jurors
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to review the conviction of a death-row inmate in Mississippi who says prosecutors discriminated by excluding Black jurors during his 2006 trial.
A jury found Terry Pitchford, who is Black, guilty of capital murder for his role in an armed robbery in which his accomplice killed a store owner, according to court records. Pitchford, now 39, was sentenced to death.
During jury selection for the Mississippi trial, prosecutors excluded four Black jurors over the objections of Pitchford’s lawyers, who charged that the exclusions were driven by racial discrimination, according to court filings. Prosecutors provided race-neutral reasons for the removals, and the trial moved forward.
In 2023, a federal judge in Mississippi ruled in Pitchford’s challenge to his conviction that prosecutors improperly removed the potential Black jurors and ordered a new trial for Pitchford. This year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that decision.
The prosecutor in Pitchford’s trial, Doug Evans, had a history of excluding Black jurors, according to a previous Supreme Court case. In a separate case involving Evans in 2019, the high court reversed the conviction of Curtis Flowers, whom a Mississippi jury convicted of quadruple murder in 1996. In the 7-2 decision, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for the majority that Evans struck an overwhelming number of Black prospective jurors during jury selection for that trial.
“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,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Attorneys with the state of Mississippi say Pitchford has not proved that the removal of the potential Black jurors was the result of racial discrimination and used nondiscriminatory explanations as discriminatory pretexts.
Central to both cases is the 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky, which held that prospective jurors cannot be struck because of their race and that lawyers must justify the dismissals of prospective jurors with race-neutral explanations.
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