Justice Sonia Sotomayor rebuked the Mississippi Supreme Court for applying a problematic standard in the case of Tony Terrell Clark, a Black death row inmate convicted by a jury of 11 white people and one Black juror.
The all-conservative Mississippi Supreme Court denied Clark’s latest appeal, which Justice Sotomayor agreed with. However, she wrote this revealed, “A double standard where the State struck Black jurors who took anything but the most hardline pro-death penalty position, but not white jurors who expressed serious doubts about the death penalty.”
Prosecutors struck Black prospective jurors at more than five times the rate of white jurors and conducted background investigations on qualified Black candidates, while ignoring similarly situated white jurors.
Mississippi’s standard states, defendants are required to prove prosecutors illegally excluded jurors based on race, thus impacting trial outcomes — a burden Sotomayor said forces courts to conclude jurors’ race affects voting.
Quoting the 2019 Flowers v. Mississippi ruling, she wrote, “one racially discriminatory peremptory strike is one too many.”
This marks Justice Sotomayor’s second warning about Clark’s case since 2023.
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