SCOTUS Reverses Mississippi Black Man's Death Sentence

After effectively gutting the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action based on the narrative that systemic racism in America is a thing of the past, the largely conservative U.S. Supreme Court has finally made a recent decision that puts it on the right side of history. Unfortunately, it took a tragic murder, a racist jury selection process and a man unjustly placed on death row as a teen for the Republican-leaning court to get it right for once.

According to CBS News, on Thursday (May 28), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Terry Pitchford, a Black death row inmate from Mississippi who argued that racial discrimination during the jury-selection process before his trial led to him being judged by 11 white jurors and a single Black juror.

First, let’s start with the background. From CBS:

The case arose from the 2004 robbery of a grocery store in Grenada, Mississippi, by two Black teenagers, Pitchford and Eric Bullins, in which the owner of the store, a White man, was killed. Bullins fired the shots that killed the owner, Reuben Britt, but because he was 16 at the time of the robbery, he was not eligible for the death penalty. Bullins was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Pitchford, who was 18 at the time, was charged with capital murder, and the state sought the death penalty.

During jury selection in Mississippi state court, then-District Attorney Doug Evans used what’s known as a peremptory strike to reject four of five potential Black jurors, which Pitchford’s defense lawyers objected to under a Supreme Court decision called Batson v. Kentucky. In that case from 1986, the high court held that prospective jurors cannot be excluded based on their race. In that ruling and in subsequent cases, the Supreme Court laid out a series of steps for how trial courts should determine whether prosecutors’ use of a peremptory strike was based on race.

Evans provided several reasons for excluding the four Black potential jurors in Pitchford’s case, arguing that one returned 15 minutes late to court from a lunch break, two others had brothers convicted of violent crimes and the fourth was similar to Pitchford in that he was young, unmarried and a father.

So, basically, the prosecution relied on racist stereotypes to dismiss Black jurors (I mean, Evens seriously rejected one over CP time) and pretended race had nothing to do with it. But the trial judge bought it, accepting the exclusion of Black jurors for what were determined to be race-neutral reasons, and just like that, only one Black juror made it past the selection process to join 11 white jurors in presiding over the case.

And it’s worth noting that Evans had a track record of targeting potential Black jurors in this manner. According to CBS, “Evans also served as the top prosecutor in the high-profile case of Curtis Flowers, whose murder conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2019. Evans was accused of consistently striking prospective Black jurors from the jury pool.”

CBS also noted that Pitchford’s conviction and sentence had previously been overturned by the federal district court in Mississippi, which ruled that “the trial court, seemingly eager to proceed to the case itself, quickly deemed the reasons as race-neutral and moved on.” Still, then that decision was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

Now, SCOTUS has once again saved Pitchford from a death sentence, voting 5-4 in his favor, with Republican Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joining the three Democratic justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Now, y’all knew damn well Clarence Thomas wasn’t about to take a break from being the court’s resident Uncle Ruckus for this ruling. Surprisingly, though, Kavanaugh not only ruled in Pitchford’s favor but also authored the majority opinion.

“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 wrote.

I mean, “confusion, oversight, an overly hurried jury selection process” is a wordy way of saying “racism,” but whatever. It was the right decision.

More of this, please—under better circumstances, of course.

SEE ALSO:

Same Bridge New Fight: Thousands Rally After SCOTUS Cuts Black Voting Rights

Justice Department Appeals To SCOTUS In New Attempt To Get Trump Free Of E. Jean Carroll Verdict

SCOTUS Reverses Mississippi Black Man’s Death Sentence, Ruling Jury Selection Was Racist was originally published on newsone.com