The Supreme Court sided Thursday with Terry Pitchford, a Black death row inmate from Mississippi, ruling 5-4 that the jury selection process in his capital murder trial failed to follow the constitutional framework meant to prevent racial discrimination. The decision in Pitchford v. Cain clears the way for his conviction and death sentence to be invalidated, though the state could choose to retry him.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court's three liberal justices. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett dissented.
The case traces back more than two decades to a 2004 robbery at a grocery store in Grenada, Mississippi, where store owner Reuben Britt, a White man, was shot and killed. Two Black teenagers, Pitchford, then 18, and Eric Bullins, then 16, were charged. Bullins, who fired the fatal shots, was not eligible for the death penalty because of his age. He received a 20-year prison sentence. Pitchford, the older of the two, was charged with capital murder, and the state sought to put him to death.
At the heart of the case is what happened before the trial even began. During jury selection in Mississippi state court, then-District Attorney Doug Evans used peremptory strikes to remove four of the five potential Black jurors from the pool. Pitchford's defense lawyers objected under Batson v. Kentucky, the 1986 Supreme Court precedent holding that prospective jurors cannot be excluded based on race.
Evans offered several reasons for the strikes. Among them: he argued that one excluded Black potential juror had returned 15 minutes late to court from a lunch break.
The trial judge accepted Evans' explanations as race-neutral and moved forward. The jury that ultimately convicted Pitchford and sentenced him to death was composed of 11 White jurors and one Black juror.
That lopsided result, and the speed with which the trial court dismissed the defense's objection, became the central issue as the case wound through years of appeals. A federal district court in Mississippi eventually sided with Pitchford and overturned his conviction, finding fault with how the trial judge handled the Batson challenge. The district court stated that the trial court, "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 5th Circuit reversed that decision, putting Pitchford's conviction back in place and sending the case toward the Supreme Court.
In his majority opinion, Kavanaugh described a jury selection process that failed at the stage where it mattered most, the third step of the Batson framework, where a trial judge is supposed to weigh whether the prosecution's stated reasons for striking jurors are pretextual.
"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."
That language is notable. Kavanaugh did not accuse Evans of deliberate racism. He described a procedural failure, one that left the constitutional question unresolved and the defendant without the protection the law requires.
The 5-4 split cut across the Court's usual ideological lines. Roberts and Kavanaugh, both appointed by Republican presidents, joined the liberal bloc. The four remaining conservative justices dissented.
Justice Gorsuch wrote a dissenting opinion arguing that the majority's decision was wrong on both the law and the facts. He wrote that the Court's ruling "errs on the law and the factual record alike."
Gorsuch also argued that Pitchford had not cleared the high bar required under federal law for securing habeas relief, the legal mechanism through which state prisoners challenge their convictions in federal court. He noted that the decision is a narrow one, applying only to Pitchford's case.
Thomas, Alito, and Barrett joined the dissent. The alignment is worth watching. Gorsuch and Barrett have drawn attention in recent months for breaking from expected conservative positions on the bench, a pattern that has generated friction in other high-profile rulings. Here, both landed firmly on the dissenting side.
The name Doug Evans carries weight beyond this case. Evans served as the top prosecutor in the case of Curtis Flowers, a Mississippi man whose murder conviction the Supreme Court overturned in 2019 after finding that Evans had consistently struck prospective Black jurors from the jury pool across multiple trials.
That Evans was also the prosecutor in Pitchford's case, and used peremptory strikes against four of five Black potential jurors, adds a layer of context the Court did not need to address directly but that hangs over the entire proceeding. The pattern, at minimum, raises questions about how jury selection was conducted in Evans' district during that era.
The Court continues to handle a heavy docket of consequential cases this term, and the justices' voting alignments in each decision offer clues about where the institution is heading.
With the Supreme Court's ruling, Pitchford's conviction is on track to be invalidated. Mississippi retains the option to retry him. Whether the state will pursue a new trial, more than 20 years after the robbery that killed Reuben Britt, remains an open question.
Pitchford has been on death row since his original conviction. Bullins, the co-defendant who actually pulled the trigger, received 20 years. That sentencing gap has always been part of the case's uncomfortable arithmetic.
The ruling does not declare that Evans acted with racial animus. It says the trial court never properly evaluated whether he did. That distinction matters. The constitutional promise of Batson v. Kentucky means nothing if the process for enforcing it gets waved through in a hurry.
Conservatives who care about the integrity of the justice system, and who believe that the death penalty must be reserved for cases where every procedural safeguard has been honored, should take the majority's reasoning seriously, even if they share Gorsuch's concerns about the scope of federal habeas review. The Court has addressed sharp internal disagreements before, and this term is producing no shortage of them.
The broader debate over how much federal courts should second-guess state trial proceedings is real and legitimate. Gorsuch's dissent reflects a serious position about judicial restraint and the limits of habeas corpus. But Kavanaugh's majority opinion points to something equally serious: when a man's life is on the line, "things broke down" is not an acceptable answer.
The Court's recent run of closely watched rulings has reminded the country that the justices do not always vote the way partisans on either side expect. This case is another example. The question it leaves behind is simple: if a prosecutor can strike four out of five Black jurors and the trial judge barely pauses to ask why, what exactly is Batson for?
A constitutional right that exists on paper but collapses under a rushed gavel is no right at all.