By Andrew Chung
May 28 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court sided on Thursday with a Black death row inmate in Mississippi who accused prosecutors of racial discrimination in blocking Black potential jurors for a trial in which he was convicted in 2006 for his role in the murder of a grocery store owner.
The justices ruled 5-4 that state courts in Mississippi did not properly evaluate Terry Pitchford's claim that four Black potential jurors had been unlawfully dismissed in violation of a landmark 1986
Supreme Court precedent known as Batson v. Kentucky that prohibits excluding jurors based on their race.
Only one member of the 12-person jury that convicted Pitchford and sentenced him to death was Black. Black people made up about 40% of the population of the county where the trial was held at the time.
"In this case, whether due to confusion, oversight, an overly hurried jury selection process or some other cause, things broke down," Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
Kavanaugh was joined by fellow conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's three liberal members.
The Mississippi Supreme Court "unreasonably applied the clearly established Batson precedents and unreasonably determined that Pitchford waived his opportunity to rebut the prosecutor's asserted race-neutral reasons" for removing the potential jurors, Kavanaugh wrote.
Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented from Thursday's decision, joined by fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett.
Gorsuch said that Pitchford had not met the stringent standards under a 1996 federal law that made it harder for individuals to challenge state convictions in federal court.
Pitchford, 40, was 18 years old when he was arrested and charged for participating in a 2004 armed robbery at the Crossroads Grocery near Grenada in rural north-central Mississippi, in which his accomplice fatally shot the shop's white owner, named Reuben Britt.
The Supreme Court effectively reinstated a 2023 decision by U.S. District Judge Michael Mills to throw out Pitchford's conviction based on the state court's violation of the Batson precedent. The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had overturned the judge's decision in 2025.
Pitchford is "now entitled to a fair trial in the state court," said his lawyer Joseph Perkovich, who welcomed the Supreme Court's ruling.
"We are very pleased to see the court recognize the extreme failure of the state courts to enforce essential protections under the Constitution," Perkovich added.
The case presented similarities to one that the court confronted in 2019 when it threw out the conviction of another Black Mississippi death row inmate, Curtis Flowers, after finding that the prosecutor, Doug Evans, unlawfully blocked Black potential jurors. Evans, who is now retired, also was the prosecutor in Pitchford's case.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
