Supreme Court Rules 5-4 for Black Death Row Inmate Over Racial Bias in Jury Selection

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday for a Black Mississippi death row inmate who argued racial bias shaped the jury that sent him to die, a 5-4 decision with immediate implications for capital cases from Mississippi to Florida.

The justices sided with Terry Pitchford, 40, who was 18 years old when he and a friend robbed the Crossroads Grocery outside Grenada, Mississippi. The friend shot store owner Reuben Britt three times, fatally wounding him, but was too young to face the death penalty. Pitchford was tried for capital murder and sentenced to death. The case has wound through the court system for 20 years.

For Treasure Coast defense attorneys and their clients, the ruling reinforces a constitutional floor that Florida courts cannot fall below: prosecutors who systematically strike Black jurors from capital cases face federal review, regardless of what state appellate courts have approved. Florida has its own documented history of Batson challenges in capital proceedings, and Thursday's decision signals the high court's continued willingness to police those violations.

At the center of Pitchford's case is retired prosecutor Doug Evans, who excused four Black prospective jurors at Pitchford's trial — leaving one Black juror seated — and whom the Supreme Court had already rebuked in 2019 when it overturned the conviction of Curtis Flowers. In that case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that Evans had engaged in a "relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals." The same judge, Joseph Loper, presided over the final two of Flowers' six trials and over Pitchford's.

The legal question before the court was narrow but consequential: whether Pitchford's lawyers had adequately objected to Judge Loper's rulings and whether the Mississippi Supreme Court was reasonable in finding they had not. U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills overturned Pitchford's conviction in 2023, citing Evans' conduct in prior cases. A unanimous three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling. The Supreme Court has now overturned that reversal.

The ruling invokes Batson v. Kentucky, the 40-year-old precedent holding that prosecutors cannot strike jurors based on race.

Pitchford's case now returns to lower courts. No retrial date has been set.

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