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.
Source: SCOTUS Reverses Mississippi Black Man’s Death Sentence, Ruling Jury Selection Was Racist
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