In 2006, a Mississippi jury found Terry Pitchford, a Black teenager, guilty of murder and sentenced him to death. It was his partner who fatally shot a grocery store owner during a robbery gone wrong, but Pitchford was convicted of being an accomplice.
For two decades, Pitchford has maintained his innocence while pointing to what he calls a glaring problem with the trial: Only one of the 12 jurors was Black — in a county that was 40 percent African American. More troubling, Pitchford says, is that those jurors were selected by a prosecutor with a history of maneuvering to keep Black people off juries.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday weighed arguments on whether Pitchford’s attorneys took the right steps to challenge what they called racist juror selections by then-prosecutor Doug Evans, a familiar figure to the justices. Much of the discussion focused on subtle exchanges between the judge and Pitchford’s attorney during the 2006 trial.
The justices’ interpretation of those minute details could have sizable implications. “The reason this matters is this is a death-penalty case, right?” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh asked an attorney for the state of Mississippi. “He was 17 when he committed the crime … but he was not the shooter, correct?”
Kavanaugh played a lead role in a previous Supreme Court review of juror selection by Evans. In 2019, the high court reversed the conviction of another Black Mississippi man, Curtis Flowers, whom Evans prosecuted in a capital murder case. Flowers was tried six times. The justices found, 7 to 2, that Evans had worked relentlessly to keep Black people off the jury.
“The state’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the state wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury,” Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion.
Evans is now retired. A representative of the Grenada County district attorney’s office confirmed that Evans no longer works there and could not provide his contact information. Other attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.
Attorneys for Pitchford say the justices should make a similar finding in his case. But Mississippi’s attorneys say this case is different. Evans’s juror selections at Pitchford’s trial were not motivated by race, they say. They have also told the court that Pitchford’s attorneys did not take the right steps in challenging Evans’s removal of Black prospective jurors.
Pitchford says Evans chose a highly disproportionate number of White jurors compared with Black ones. At that time, Grenada County was 40 percent Black. By the time the judge had excused various potential jurors, the pool was composed of 36 White people and five Black people.
Evans then used seven peremptory challenges to strike four of the five Black prospective jurors and three of the White ones. He had marked up his juror list by placing a “W” next to the names of the White people and “B” next to the names of Black people, court records show.
When Allison Steiner, Pitchford’s attorney, tried to challenge Evans’s peremptory strikes, the judge concluded there was no violation, according to court records. But the defense team argues that the judge made an error and did not properly conclude the Batson inquiry. Attorneys for the state say Steiner waived her right to challenge the strikes.
On Tuesday, the justices heavily scrutinized those steps in a discussion of that Batson test, meant to determine whether juror selections are racially biased.
During jury selection, judges and attorneys can eliminate potential jurors for specific reasons, such as suspected bias toward the prosecution or defendant. But attorneys on each side also can strike a handful of jurors for no reason, in what are known as peremptory challenges. Those typically cannot be second-guessed — except when it comes to race and gender.
That is due to the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky, in which the Supreme Court found that peremptory challenges cannot be used to exclude a juror solely on the basis of his or her race. (The prohibition was later extended to gender, as well) Batson set out a multistep test for courts to identify racial discrimination in the selection process.
Justice Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. agreed that the way the trial court conducted the test is “not a model to be followed in future cases.” But he questioned whether Pitchford’s attorney was too “timid and reticent” in asserting that Evans struck prospective jurors on the basis of race and that his race-neutral reasons for doing so were pretexts.
“Trial lawyers have to have a certain amount of toughness,” Alito said. “She had every opportunity to make her point, and she didn’t.”
Attorneys for the state deny that the jurors were struck because of their race, writing that Evans had race-neutral reasons for doing so. As for the marked-up lists, the “information helps to identify jurors at jury selection and is critical to bringing or defending against Batson claims,” the attorneys wrote in filings to the high court.
They add that Steiner waived her right to make her objections to the strikes.
Pitchford was indicted on a capital murder charge in 2004 after he and Eric Bullins robbed the Crossroads Grocery store.
Bullins fatally shot store owner Reuben Britt with a .22-caliber pistol, according to court filings. Pitchford, armed with a gun loaded with pellets meant to kill rats, did not shoot Britt, according to his filings. Pitchford says he shot into the floor when Bullins turned the gun on him. The state says the pellets contributed to the store owner’s death. Pitchford denies that.
Bullins was charged with capital murder, but he was not eligible for the death penalty because he was 16 at the time of the killing, according to court records. Bullins pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Roughly half of U.S. states, including Mississippi, allow capital murder charges to be brought against someone alleged to have been an accomplice to a crime in which someone is killed — such as during an armed robbery — even if they did not pull the trigger or intend for anyone to die. Pitchford was indicted over such a crime, known as felony murder.
The post Supreme Court weighs racism claim over jury selection in death penalty case appeared first on Washington Post.
