Supreme Court sides with Black death row inmate, ending 20-year legal battle over jury makeup

The Supreme Court has sided with a Black death row inmate from Mississippi who claimed there was racial bias in the makeup of the jury that convicted him.

By a 5-4 vote, the justices backed Terry Pitchford, who was sentenced to death for his role in the killing of a grocery store owner. There was one Black juror in his trial, which had similarities to that of another Black man on Mississippi’s death row whose conviction the high court overturned seven years ago.

Doug Evans, a now-retired prosecutor with a history of dismissing Black jurors for discriminatory reasons, had excused four other Black people.

The Supreme Court ruled 40 years ago in Batson v. Kentucky that jurors could not be excused from service because of their race and set up a system by which trial judges could evaluate claims of discrimination and the race-neutral explanations by prosecutors.

Pitchford’s case focused on whether his lawyers did enough to object to Judge Joseph Loper’s rulings and whether the state Supreme Court acted reasonably in ruling they had not.

In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death sentence and conviction of Curtis Flowers, because of what Justice Brett Kavanaugh described as a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.” Evans was the prosecutor in that case, and Loper presided over the final two of Flowers' six trials.

Pitchford, now 40, was 18 when he and a friend decided to rob the Crossroads Grocery, just outside Grenada, in northern Mississippi. The friend shot store owner Reuben Britt three times, fatally wounding him, but was ineligible for the death penalty because he was younger than 18. Pitchford was tried for capital murder and was sentenced to death.

The case has been making its way through the court system for 20 years. In 2023, U.S District Judge Michael P. Mills overturned Pitchford’s conviction, holding that the trial judge did not give Pitchford’s lawyers enough of a chance to argue that the prosecution was improperly dismissing Black jurors.

Mills wrote that his ruling was partially motivated by Evans’ actions in prior cases. A unanimous panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling.