SCOTUS rules in favor of Miss. man on death row in racial bias case

OAN Staff Jenna Lee
6:11 PM – Thursday, May 28, 2026

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in favor of a Black man on Mississippi’s death row who was convicted of capital murder and argued that racial bias tainted jury selection in his case.

On Thursday, SCOTUS overturned the conviction of Terry Pitchford, a 40-year-old Black man. Pitchford was originally sentenced to death for his role in the 2004 armed robbery and murder of grocery store owner Reuben Britt when Pitchford was 18 years old. His co-defendant, Eric Bullins, fired the fatal shots but was spared from the death penalty because he was a minor under the age of 18 when the crime occurred.

“Mr. Pitchford is now entitled to a fair trial in the state court — one without racial taint in the selection of his jury,” said Joseph Perkovich, one of Pitchford’s lawyers, in a statement. Pitchford’s lawyers noted that just one Black juror was on the 12-member panel at the trial in a county that was roughly 40% Black.

During the jury selection in Mississippi state court, then-District Attorney Doug Evans used a peremptory strike to reject four out of five potential Black jurors. Pitchford’s defense lawyers objected to the strikes under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1986 decision Batson v. Kentucky, which ruled that prospective jurors cannot be excluded based on race.

In 2019, the Supreme Court threw out the murder conviction of Curtis Flowers—another Black man from Mississippi—after finding that Evans had engaged in a “relentless, determined effort” to unlawfully block Black jury members in that case.

Pitchford initially appealed his conviction and death sentence to the Mississippi Supreme Court, but later sought relief from a federal district court. In 2023, U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills ruled in Pitchford’s favor and overturned the conviction.

“The trial court, seemingly eager to proceed to the case itself, quickly deemed the reasons as race-neutral and moved on,” noted Judge Mills at the time, adding that the trial court had actively thwarted the defense attempts to show the prosecutor’s reasons were pretextual.

 

However, in a 2025 ruling, the New Orleans-based 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, prompting Pitchford’s final appeal to the nation’s highest court.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored Thursday’s majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices.

“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,” wrote Kavanaugh.

 

Prosecutors noted however, that Mississippi retains the option to retry Pitchford in a new trial if they choose to pursue the charges again.

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