Certain names will be familiar to the Supreme Court as it weighs a Mississippi death-penalty appeal involving Terry Pitchford, a Black man convicted in the 2004 killing of Reuben Britt, the owner of the Crossroads Grocery just outside Grenada in northern Mississippi. Oral arguments in the case are set for Tuesday.
Pitchford was 18 when he and a friend went to the store to rob it. His friend shot Britt three times, fatally wounding him, but the friend was ineligible for the death penalty because he was younger than 18. Pitchford was tried for capital murder and sentenced to death, and his case has moved through the courts for about 20 years.
At the center of the Supreme Court case is Pitchford’s claim of racial discrimination in the composition of the jury that tried him. The Supreme Court’s review focuses on whether Pitchford’s lawyers did enough to object to Judge Joseph Loper’s rulings and whether the Mississippi Supreme Court acted reasonably in upholding the conviction, according to the issues framed in the federal court proceedings.
The record discussed in the court filings includes the conduct of Doug Evans, a now-retired prosecutor with a history that federal judges and the Supreme Court previously described as discriminatory in jury selection. The case notes that, in the selection of Pitchford’s jury, prosecutors dismissed four of the five remaining Black people in the jury pool and defense lawyers objected.
Pitchford’s challenge also looks back at how similar issues were treated in an earlier capital case in the same district. Just seven years ago, in a case involving Curtis Flowers—where the district attorney, trial judge and state high court were the same—the Supreme Court overturned both the death sentence and the conviction. Justice Brett Kavanaugh described what the court found as a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals” in that earlier case, and seven of the then-current justices were also on the court at the time.
In Pitchford’s case, a U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills overturned Pitchford’s conviction in 2023, ruling that the trial judge did not give Pitchford’s lawyers enough opportunity to argue that the prosecution was improperly dismissing Black jurors. Mills wrote that part of his ruling was motivated by Evans’ actions in prior cases.
A unanimous panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Mills’ ruling, according to the account described in the Supreme Court-related briefing. The appeal now before the justices also invokes Batson v. Kentucky, the 1986 Supreme Court decision that held prosecutors cannot use race to exclude jurors and that set up a process in which trial judges evaluate claims of discrimination and prosecutors’ stated race-neutral reasons.
Pitchford’s case also includes the way the trial judge handled objections during jury selection. Mills wrote that, in the process of selecting Pitchford’s jury, Judge Loper accepted all four of the prosecution’s explanations and then moved on without analyzing whether race was the reason, despite the defense objections. Loper’s handling of the objections and the adequacy of the defense’s challenges are among the issues the Supreme Court will review.
Pitchford’s lawyer, Joseph Perkovich, argued that the record favors Pitchford. In an email described in the filing record, Perkovich wrote that Loper “did not grasp he had to a constitutional duty to determine whether the reasons the district attorney gave for striking the Black citizens were credible and truthful,” and that “The judge simply failed even to try to discharge that critical duty, despite the defense’s efforts.”
Mississippi’s response defends the state courts’ handling of the appeal. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch defended the Mississippi Supreme Court’s decision in the state’s written filing and said Evans did not inappropriately strike Black people from the jury.
Pitchford’s lawyers are seeking relief that they say could follow if the Supreme Court agrees the jury strikes were discriminatory. Their written filings argue Pitchford should be released or retried, and they contend the case should return to the state Supreme Court to review the arguments about discriminatory jury selection.
Evans’ involvement connects to the timeline of the prosecution’s broader history in Mississippi. The Flowers case involved multiple trials in the shootings deaths of four people, and the account in the filings says Evans was the prosecutor there as well. Evans stepped down from his job in 2023, and the account says Curtis Flowers was released from prison in 2019 before Mississippi dropped charges the following year.
The federal judge’s analysis of the earlier history also appears in the Supreme Court briefs. Mills wrote that, on its own, the Flowers case does not prove anything; but Mills said the Mississippi Supreme Court should have examined that history as part of the “totality of the circumstances” analysis in considering Pitchford’s appeal.