Supreme Court declines to hear Mississippi death row inmate’s appeal
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up the appeal of Mississippi death row inmate Tony Terrell Clark, who argued prosecutors struck jurors because of their race, court records show.
Clark, who will turn 46 this month, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2014 shooting death of a 13-year-old and the attempted murder of the boy’s father at a convenience store in Canton, according to court records. State officials have not requested an execution date, court records show.
Although she agreed with the decision not to hear the appeal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a separate six-page statement criticizing “the problematic standard” the Mississippi Supreme Court applied under Batson v. Kentucky when assessing Batson claims in the context of ineffective-assistance claims under Strickland v. Washington, Sotomayor wrote. The U.S. Supreme Court decided Batson in 1986 and Strickland in 1984, establishing tests for proving discriminatory jury strikes and ineffective counsel, respectively.
Sotomayor said the prosecution struck Black prospective jurors at a rate more than five times that of white jurors and conducted what she called dubious investigations into some of the most qualified Black prospective jurors while not investigating similarly situated white jurors, according to her statement. The Mississippi Supreme Court, she noted, faulted Clark’s trial attorney for not presenting a comparative analysis of minority and nonminority jurors, which led Clark to file a petition alleging ineffective assistance of counsel, court filings show.
The state used seven peremptory strikes against Black people during jury selection, and the final jury included 11 white jurors, one Black juror and two white alternate jurors, court records show. The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected Clark’s direct appeal and wrote that “(t)he case before us is not Flowers,” a reference to the Curtis Flowers case that led to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Flowers’ convictions and death sentence in 2019, Sotomayor noted. Clark’s attorneys have also argued in state court that he is intellectually disabled under Atkins v. Virginia and therefore ineligible for execution; the Mississippi Supreme Court remanded the case for an Atkins hearing in 2023 and the trial court has granted experts access to Clark, court records show. Clark’s attorneys filed a petition for post-conviction relief in Madison County Circuit Court on the same day the high court issued its decision, court filings show.
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