Supreme Court sides with Mississippi death row inmate who argued racially biased jury selection - National & International News -

Supreme Court sides with Mississippi death row inmate who argued racial jury selection

In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the appeal from Mississippi death row inmate Terry Pitchford, 40. In 2004, when Pitchford was 18, he and an accomplice took part in a robbery of Crossroads Grocery in Grenada that ended in the fatal shooting of the store’s owner, Reuben Britt. It was Pitchford’s accomplice who fired the fatal shots, but the accomplice was under 18 and thus ineligible for the death penalty.

In 2006, Pitchford was convicted of capital murder by a jury with just one Black member, while Grenada County was 40% Black at the time. Pitchford’s prosecution was lead by former District Attorney Doug Evans, who formerly served Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit Court District (covering Attala, Carroll, Choctaw, Grenada, Montgomery, Webster, and Winston counties). In its 2019 decision in Flowers v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court found that Evans had wrongly excluded Black jurors from a trial in another case involving a Black defendant, namely Curtis Flowers.

Today’s Supreme Court ruling for Pitchford revives a lower federal court ruling that found that presiding Judge Joe Loper did not adequately test the defense’s claim of racial bias in jury selection. With the new ruling for Pitchford, the State must either retry Pitchford or release him.

The Flowers case

Curtis Flowers was tried six times and convicted four times in a 1996 quadruple homicide at a Winona furniture store. Each of the convictions was overturned either due to racial bias in jury selection or other prosecutorial misconduct. When the Supreme Court threw out Flowers’s final conviction in 2019, Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that District Attorney Evans had made a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals,” suggesting a desire “to try Flowers before a jury with as few Black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury”. Evans left office in 2023.

Judge Loper – who also presided over Flowers’ last two trials – released Flowers after the Supreme Court decision in 2019. Loper also gave his opinion that the State of Mississippi would find it difficult to prosecute him again. He cited the possibility of a viable alternative suspect in the quadruple murder and the fact that several key witnesses had either recanted or changed their testimony over the years. The State of Mississippi has so far decided not to prosecute Flowers for a seventh time.