The Supreme Court sided with a Black death row inmate from Mississippi on Thursday, ruling 5-4 that the trial court failed to follow required procedures when the defendant challenged the prosecutor's removal of Black jurors. The decision in Pitchford v. Cain invalidates Terry Pitchford's capital murder conviction and death sentence, and reopens a case rooted in a 2004 grocery store robbery that left a man dead.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and three liberal justices. The four remaining conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, dissented. The split alone tells a story about the Court's internal fault lines on questions of race, procedure, and the death penalty.
The core question was narrow but consequential: did the trial judge properly apply the three-step framework from Batson v. Kentucky, the 1986 precedent holding that prospective jurors cannot be excluded based on race? The majority concluded the process broke down. The dissent said the majority got both the law and the facts wrong.
The underlying crime occurred in 2004 in Grenada, Mississippi. Pitchford, then 18, and his co-defendant Eric Bullins, then 16, robbed a grocery store. Bullins fired the shots that killed the store's owner, Reuben Britt, a White man. Bullins, too young for the death penalty, received 20 years in prison. Pitchford, two years older, faced capital murder charges. The state sought death.
During jury selection, then-District Attorney Doug Evans used peremptory strikes to reject four of five potential Black jurors from the pool. Pitchford's defense attorneys objected under Batson, arguing the strikes were racially motivated.
Evans offered what he called race-neutral reasons for each strike. One prospective juror had returned 15 minutes late from lunch. Two had brothers convicted of violent crimes. A fourth, Evans argued, was too similar to Pitchford, young, unmarried, a father.
The trial judge accepted those justifications and moved on. The resulting jury seated 11 White jurors and one Black juror. That jury convicted Pitchford of capital murder and sentenced him to die.
Under Batson, once a defendant raises a racial objection and the prosecutor offers a race-neutral explanation, the trial court must allow the defense to argue that the stated reasons are pretextual, a cover for racial discrimination. That is the third step of the framework. It is not optional.
Pitchford's lawyers argued they were never given the chance to complete that third step. The majority agreed. Kavanaugh wrote that "things broke down" during jury selection, as CBS News reported:
"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."
A federal district court in Mississippi later reviewed the case and sided with Pitchford, overturning his conviction. That court found the trial judge had been "seemingly eager to proceed to the case itself" and had "quickly deemed the reasons as race-neutral and moved on."
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the district court, reinstating the conviction. Pitchford then took the case to the Supreme Court, and won.
Doug Evans is not an unfamiliar name at the Supreme Court. He was the top prosecutor in the case of Curtis Flowers, another Mississippi death row inmate whose murder conviction the Court overturned in 2019. In that case, Evans was accused of consistently striking prospective Black jurors from the jury pool, a pattern the justices found troubling enough to vacate the conviction.
The fact that the same prosecutor appears in two separate Supreme Court reversals involving the same type of Batson violation is not a coincidence the Court ignored. The majority opinion in Pitchford effectively found that the trial court's handling of the jury selection process denied Pitchford the procedural protections the Constitution requires, protections that exist precisely because prosecutors like Evans have historically abused peremptory strikes.
This is a point worth dwelling on. Batson does not prevent prosecutors from striking jurors who happen to be Black. It requires them to offer non-racial reasons, and it requires the court to let the defense challenge those reasons before ruling. When a trial judge skips that step, the entire framework collapses. And when the same prosecutor keeps triggering these challenges, the pattern speaks louder than any single case.
Justice Gorsuch, writing for the four dissenters, argued the majority "errs on the law and the factual record alike." He characterized the decision as a narrow one, applying only to Pitchford's specific circumstances. The dissent's concern appears to be that the majority second-guessed the trial court's handling of the Batson process without sufficient deference to the lower courts that reviewed the record.
The internal divisions among the Court's conservative justices have been on full display this term. Roberts and Kavanaugh have broken with Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett on several high-profile cases, creating a pattern that frustrates those who expected a unified conservative bloc.
Whether this split reflects principled disagreement or something deeper is an open question. But the 5-4 lineup in Pitchford, two conservative justices joining three liberals to overturn a death sentence, will fuel the debate about what "conservative" means on this Court.
Chief Justice Roberts has insisted the Court is not a political body, but rulings like this one test that claim in public view. The political valence of a death-penalty case involving race, jury selection, and a prosecutor with a documented track record is impossible to ignore, no matter how narrowly the opinion is framed.
The ruling invalidates Pitchford's conviction and death sentence, but it does not set him free. Mississippi retains the option to retry him. Whether the state will pursue a new trial, and whether it can seat a jury that survives a Batson challenge, remains to be seen.
The victim's family deserves better than two decades of procedural failure. Reuben Britt was killed during a robbery in his own store. His killer, Bullins, served 20 years. Pitchford, who did not fire the fatal shots, faced execution. Now his case starts over, not because anyone disputes the robbery, but because the prosecutor's office and the trial judge cut corners on jury selection.
That is the uncomfortable reality of procedural rights. They protect the guilty and the innocent alike. They exist because the alternative, letting the government skip steps when it is convenient, leads to outcomes that corrode public trust in the system itself.
The tensions among the justices this term have been unusually visible, and Pitchford v. Cain adds another chapter. Kavanaugh's willingness to write the majority opinion overturning a death sentence signals that he takes the Batson framework seriously, even when it produces outcomes that make conservatives uncomfortable.
Gorsuch is right that the ruling is narrow. But narrow rulings still carry weight. And when the same prosecutor's jury-selection practices produce two Supreme Court reversals, the narrowness of any single opinion does not erase the breadth of the underlying problem.
The institutional credibility of the Court depends on its willingness to enforce its own precedents, even when the defendant is unsympathetic, even when the crime is real, and even when the political optics cut against the ruling. That is what separates a court from a legislature.
Conservatives who care about the rule of law should not flinch from this ruling. The problem in Pitchford v. Cain was not that a death row inmate got a second chance. The problem was that a prosecutor gamed jury selection, a trial judge let it slide, and a man spent two decades on death row after a process that did not follow the rules.
If the government wants the power to execute its citizens, it had better follow its own procedures to the letter. That is not a liberal principle. That is the most conservative principle there is.
