Supreme court sides with Mississippi man on death row in racial bias case | Mississippi
The US supreme court ruled Thursday in favor of Terry Pitchford, a black man sentenced to death in Mississippi who claimed his conviction was due to the jury being racially biased.
The judges sided with Pitchford in a 5-4 vote.
Pitchford, now 40, was just 18 when he and another teenager robbed a grocery store in 2004. The other teenager who fired the fatal shot was still a minor and ineligible for the death penalty, but Pitchford was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death.
The focus of the high court decision was jury selection in the Pitchford case, in which state prosecutors dismissed four of the five Black jurors. The jury, consisting of 11 white jurors and one Black juror, would later convict Pitchford and sentence him to death.
Retired prosecutor Doug Evans, who has a history of dismissing black jurors for discriminatory reasons, had excused four other black jurors, according to the Associated Press. Pitchford’s attorney objected to the strikes during the hearing, but judge Joseph Loper allowed it.
“The court did not give Pitchford’s attorney adequate opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s racially biased justifications for assaulting 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 superior court justices appeared skeptical about whether Loper had adequately applied the Batson objection; This refers to a 1986 decision in Batson v Kentucky, in which the court reaffirmed that it was unconstitutional to keep black people off juries because of their race.
A. Batson challenge It triggers a three-step process in which the objecting party must first show that there is a discriminatory inference. The striking party must then make plausible, race-neutral explanations for attacking specific jurors. The judge then decides whether intentional discrimination occurred.
Most of the verbal argument focused on Loper’s actions in the third step of the challenge.
Seven years ago, in a case involving Loper and Evans, Mississippi’s highest court overturned the death penalty and conviction of Curtis Flowers, a Black man who was tried six times over more than 20 years. At that time there were seven out of nine justices present on the high court. Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative judge, wrote that Evans made a “relentless and determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.”
