The Supreme Court sided with a death row inmate in Mississippi who challenged the dismissal of four black potential jurors during jury selection for his trial in a sharply divided ruling Thursday.Terry Pitchford was convicted by a state jury to death for his role in the 2004 killing of the owner of a grocery store during a botched robbery, but he challenged that conviction based on the circumstances of how the group of prospective black jurors was dismissed. The Mississippi Supreme Court tossed out his challenge, finding the trial court properly applied the three-step process to challenge whether a juror was unlawfully dismissed on racial grounds, which was set out by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Batson v. Kentucky.With its ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court reversed the state Supreme Court, ruling 5-4 that the lower court failed to follow the Batson standard and that Pitchford did not waive his right to contest the dismissal of the prospective black jurors for race-neutral reasons.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh penned the majority ruling, finding that the trial court did not give Pitchford’s lawyers an opportunity to rebut the race-neutral reasons given by the prosecution to strike the four prospective black jurors from the jury pool, which should have been afforded to him as the third part of the Batson standard.
