The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with a Black death row inmate in Mississippi who challenged his conviction, claiming the prosecutor wrongly eliminated Black jurors from the pool that found him guilty of capital murder.
In a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court majority said Terry Pitchford’s lawyer did not have proper opportunity to challenge the prosecutor’s removal of minority jurors from hearing and deciding his fate.
“After a prosecutor asserts race-neutral reasons for a peremptory strike, the defense counsel 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 Kavanaugh wrote.
“In this case, whether due to confusion, oversight, an overly hurried jury selection process, or some other cause, things broke down,” he said in a decision joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three Democratic appointees.
Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Amy Coney Barrett dissented from the decision.
The decision sends the case back to lower courts to decide the next step.
Pitchford was sentenced to death in 2006 when he was 18 years old.
His trial began with jury selection on Feb. 6, 2006, and ended three days later with his conviction of capital murder.
Jury selection and opening arguments took place on the same day.
Pitchford’s lawyers had told the Supreme Court that the crime scene investigation was botched and that Pitchford at least once tried to invoke his right to remain silent.
More pointedly, they’re arguing the prosecution was racist in the selection of jurors, noting that one Black juror was empaneled.
Pitchford was convicted of killing a grocery store clerk during a botched robbery in 2004 with another accomplice who was a juvenile at the time.
Prosecutors can strike jurors for cause — based on a conflict of interest with the case or bias — and also for no reason whatsoever, known as a peremptory challenge.
But peremptory challenges are limited in number and cannot be done for any discriminatory reason such as gender, race or religion. That was one of three criminal law rulings the high court handed down on Thursday.
In one, the justices said a defendant needed to challenge his sentencing through a habeas corpus proceeding, not the sentencing reduction process he chose instead.
And in the other, the justices ruled that the First Step Act wasn’t retroactive in the defendants’ cases.
They’d argued that their demand for “compassionate release” qualified as a “compelling” reason under the law to reopen their sentencing decision. But the court said the law didn’t read that way, even as it acknowledged that if they were to be sentenced today, they would have gotten significantly lower time behind bars.
Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat and a major backer of the 2018 law, said Congress may have to pass new legislation to make explicit that it wants compassionate releases to be considered.
• Stephen Dinan contributed to this story.
