The Supreme Court on Thursday reversed a federal appeals court and sent back the case of a Mississippi death-row inmate who argued the jury that convicted him was racially biased, the court said in its opinion.
Court documents say that in 2004 two teenagers, Terry Pitchford and Eric Bullins, robbed a grocery store near Grenada. Bullins shot store owner Reuben Britt three times, killing him, and later received a 20-year sentence after a plea deal because he was under 18. Pitchford, who was 18 at the time, was charged with capital murder and ultimately received a death sentence, the documents show.
The Supreme Court said prosecutors used peremptory strikes against four of the five black potential jurors at Pitchford’s trial and that the Mississippi Supreme Court unreasonably applied Batson v. Kentucky, the court precedent barring race-based peremptory challenges. The case had gone through a series of rulings: the Mississippi high court found Pitchford waived his Batson objection, a federal district court reversed, the Fifth Circuit reinstated the waiver finding, and the Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit, the opinion says.
Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the record did not show that Pitchford had been given an opportunity to argue that the prosecutor’s asserted race-neutral reasons were pretextual. “The State’s argument that Pitchford preserved his Batson objection but nonetheless somehow waived his Batson pretext argument does not make much sense and is not a reasonable reading of this record,” Kavanaugh wrote. He added that the usual trial-court procedure for resolving Batson claims at the third step never occurred despite Pitchford’s counsel’s efforts, the opinion said.
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas dissented. Gorsuch, writing for the dissent, said the state offered race-neutral reasons for each strike and quoted the prosecutor’s explanations — including that one juror returned late to court after lunch and had a history of mental problems, two had brothers convicted of violent offenses, and another “had no opinion on the death penalty” and was similar to Pitchford in age and family status — and that the trial judge accepted those reasons. The Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit’s judgment and remanded the case for further proceedings, and Pitchford, now 40, remains in custody, the opinion says.
Jon Ross Myers is the executive editor and publisher of the Mississippi News Network, Mississippi's largest digital only media company. He can be reached at editor@tippahnews.com
