The Supreme Court sided Thursday with Terry Pitchford, a Black death row inmate from Mississippi, ruling 5-4 that the trial court denied him a fair hearing when it failed to let his lawyers challenge the prosecutor's reasons for striking Black jurors. The decision in Pitchford v. Cain overturns Pitchford's capital murder conviction and invalidates his death sentence, though Mississippi may retry him.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court's three liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett dissented. The lineup puts Roberts and Kavanaugh on the opposite side of the bench from the four conservative justices who have increasingly defined the Court's right flank.
The case turns on a procedural failure during jury selection in a Mississippi courtroom more than two decades ago, and on the constitutional rule, established in Batson v. Kentucky (1986), that prosecutors cannot use peremptory strikes to exclude jurors based on race.
In 2004, Pitchford, then 18, and Eric Bullins, then 16, robbed a grocery store in Grenada, Mississippi. Bullins fired the shots that killed the store's owner, Reuben Britt, a White man. Because Bullins was under 18, he was ineligible for the death penalty. He received 20 years in prison.
Pitchford faced capital murder charges, and the state sought death. During jury selection, then-District Attorney Doug Evans used peremptory strikes to remove four of five Black prospective jurors. The reasons Evans offered included that one juror returned 15 minutes late from a lunch break, two had brothers convicted of violent crimes, and one was demographically similar to Pitchford, young, unmarried, and a father.
Pitchford's defense lawyers objected under Batson, which requires a three-step process: the defense raises an inference of racial discrimination, the prosecutor offers race-neutral explanations, and then the defense must have a chance to argue those explanations are pretextual. The trial judge, however, accepted Evans's explanations and moved on, without ever letting the defense rebut them at step three.
The resulting jury: 11 White jurors and 1 Black juror. Pitchford was convicted and sentenced to death.
Pitchford appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court, then sought relief in federal district court in Mississippi. That federal court ruled in his favor and overturned the conviction, finding that the trial judge had been "seemingly eager to proceed to the case itself, quickly deemed the reasons as race-neutral and moved on."
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed that decision, putting Pitchford back on death row. The Supreme Court then took the case.
The majority found that the trial court's shortcut was not a minor procedural hiccup. Kavanaugh, writing for the five-justice majority, put it plainly:
"In this case, whether due to confusion, oversight, an overly hurried jury selection process, or some other cause, things broke down, and the ordinary trial-court procedure for resolving Batson claims at step three never occurred, notwithstanding the repeated efforts of Pitchford's counsel to pursue and preserve the Batson objection."
Kavanaugh also stressed the broader principle at stake: after a prosecutor offers race-neutral reasons for a strike, the defense "must at least have an opportunity to argue that the asserted race-neutral reasons were not the actual reasons, that is, the reasons were pretextual."
Justice Gorsuch, writing for the four dissenters, argued that the majority "errs on the law and the factual record alike." He contended that Pitchford failed to clear the high bar for securing relief under federal law. Gorsuch also characterized the ruling as "a narrow one, applying only to Pitchford", a point that may limit the decision's reach but does little to change its immediate effect on this case.
The split is notable. Gorsuch and Barrett have drawn attention recently for breaking with other conservatives on high-profile cases, and here they found themselves on the opposite side from Roberts and Kavanaugh. The Court's internal coalitions continue to shift in ways that defy simple left-right predictions.
That fluidity is worth watching. The Court faces a heavy docket this term, with several consequential rulings expected in the coming weeks, and the lineup in Pitchford may preview further fractures.
The prosecutor in this case, Doug Evans, is no stranger to accusations of racial bias in jury selection. In 2019, the Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of Curtis Flowers, another Black defendant from Mississippi, after finding that Evans had consistently struck prospective Black jurors across multiple trials. That case drew national attention and raised serious questions about Evans's pattern of conduct.
The Pitchford case now marks the second time the nation's highest court has found that Evans's jury-selection practices violated constitutional protections. Whatever one thinks of the legal standard, the pattern speaks for itself. A prosecutor who keeps ending up on the wrong side of Batson is either remarkably unlucky or remarkably indifferent to the rule.
The numbers in Pitchford's case are hard to dismiss. Four of five Black potential jurors were struck. The final panel was 11-to-1 White. And Black people make up 37 percent of Mississippi's population, making that jury composition a stark outlier from the community the court was supposed to represent.
Pitchford's conviction is gone. His death sentence is gone. But justice for Reuben Britt's family remains unfinished. The state of Mississippi can retry Pitchford, and his attorney, Joseph Perkovich, said simply: "Mr. Pitchford is now entitled to a fair trial in the state court."
That framing matters. The ruling does not declare Pitchford innocent. It does not free him. It says that the process that put him on death row was broken at a fundamental level, that a man's life hung on a jury selected through a procedure the Constitution does not permit.
Conservatives who value law and order should not flinch from that conclusion. A conviction obtained through a flawed process is not a strong conviction. It is a weak one, vulnerable to reversal, corrosive to public trust, and ultimately an obstacle to the very accountability the system is supposed to deliver. If Mississippi's prosecutors had followed the rules the first time, this case might never have reached the Supreme Court at all.
Justice Gorsuch has spoken publicly about the importance of judicial independence and the rule of law. His dissent here reflects a genuine disagreement about the standard of review under federal habeas law, not a dismissal of Batson itself. Reasonable jurists can disagree on where to draw the line for federal intervention in state criminal proceedings.
But the majority's reasoning is straightforward. The trial judge skipped a required step. The defense never got to argue that the prosecutor's explanations were pretextual. And a man was sentenced to die by a jury from which nearly every Black candidate had been removed.
The open questions are real. Will Mississippi retry Pitchford? Will the evidence hold up two decades later? Will Evans, or his successors, face any institutional reckoning for a pattern of conduct that has now drawn two Supreme Court rebukes? None of those answers are clear.
What is clear is that the constitutional guarantee against racial discrimination in jury selection is not optional, not aspirational, and not something a trial judge can wave past because the docket is crowded. Courts at every level are grappling with questions of race, representation, and procedural fairness, and getting the process right is not a concession to any political faction. It is the baseline.
A system that cuts corners on who sits in the jury box has no business asking anyone to trust the verdict that comes out of it.