Supreme Court takes up Mississippi murder to review jury selection bias

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court took up an appeal on Monday from a Mississippi man who says his capital murder trial was tainted by the prosecution dismissing Black jurors for discriminatory reasons.

Over half of the original jury pool in the 2006 trial was Black, but the final jury that sentenced Terry Pitchford to death only included one Black person. The high court agreed to decide whether Pitchford qualified for a Batson claim, which allows defendants to challenge the exclusion of a potential juror based on their race, ethnicity, sex or other protected characteristic.

Pitchford’s conviction resulted from a fatal 2004 robbery that killed Reuben Britt, the store owner of Crossroads Grocery, just outside Grenada in northern Mississippi. Britt was shot three times by Pitchford’s accomplice, Eric Bullins. Pitchford says he fired nonlethal pellets into the floor, but prosecutors charged him with capital murder claiming he believed the .38 caliber revolver was loaded with lethal ammunition.

During the trial, prosecutors struck four of the five potential Black jurors without any voir dire examination. Pitchford’s attorney raised a Batson claim, which was denied by the judge.

Under Supreme Court precedent in Batson v. Kentucky, such claims are considered through a three-step process requiring the defense to present preliminary evidence of intentional racial discrimination; allowing prosecutors to offer a race-neutral explanation; and requiring the court to consider all available information.

The prosecutor in Pitchford’s case, former District Attorney Doug Evans, has already faced Supreme Court scrutiny over his efforts to exclude Black jurors while trying Curtis Flowers six times for the same crime. In 2019, the high court overturned Flowers’ death sentence and conviction, and Evans resigned as district attorney in 2023.

A federal judge overturned Pitchford’s death penalty conviction in 2023, finding that the trial court failed to give his defense lawyer a chance to counter the state’s arguments. But the Fifth Circuit reversed that ruling and upheld Pitchford’s death sentence.

Current and former prosecutors say that racially discriminatory practices persist four decades after the court’s ruling in Batson, urging the justices to hear Pitchford’s case to clarify trial courts’ constitutional duties.

“The evidence of widespread discrimination in prosecutorial exercises of peremptory strikes is staggering,” the prosecutors wrote. “Empirical studies from jurisdictions across the country reveal that prosecutors continue to strike Black jurors in alarmingly disproportionate rates compared to white jurors.”

The prosecutors cited a California study that found peremptory strikes to remove Black jurors in 72% of cases while striking white jurors in only 0.5% of cases. In the Mississippi district where Pitchford was charged, a 2018 study found that Black prospective jurors were more than four times as likely to be struck as white prospective jurors.

The high court will hear Pitchford’s appeal early next year.

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