A Fractured Supreme Court Plucks a Death-Row Defendant From Harm

While it’s not a surprise that the high court reached a just conclusion, it’s troubling to see how many justices didn’t join the majority.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Black death-row prisoner in Mississippi on Thursday who claimed that he had been denied a fair trial because prosecutors had struck all but one of the Black potential jurors during jury selection.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for a 5–4 court, held that the Mississippi courts had “unreasonably applied the clearly established Batson precedents,” referring to a landmark 1986 case, and “unreasonably determined” that defendant had “waived his opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s asserted race-neutral reasons” for striking multiple Black potential jurors.

The court’s ruling is not surprising based on the available record. But the fact that only five of the court’s nine members reached this conclusion is somewhat troubling. Kavanaugh, along with Chief Justice John Roberts, joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson to form the majority. Justice Neil Gorsuch led the rest of the conservatives in dissent.

This lineup is not as surprising as it might look. While Kavanaugh tends to vote with his fellow conservatives on most criminal justice matters, he has shown a special interest in questions of racial discrimination during jury selection throughout his legal career. He even wrote a law review note on Batson v. Kentucky, the landmark 1986 case on the matter, while attending Yale Law School in 1989.

Thursday’s ruling is good news for Terry Pitchford, who robbed a grocery store in Mississippi in 2004 along with his then-friend Eric Bullins. During the robbery, Bullins shot and killed the store’s owner. State prosecutors reached a plea deal with Bullins, who was ineligible for the death penalty as a 16-year-old, and instead sent him to prison for 20 years. Under the felony-murder rule, prosecutors then charged Pitchford, who was 18 years old at the time, with first-degree murder, even though he didn’t pull the trigger. A Mississippi jury convicted him, and the court sentenced him to death.

As recent events have shown, the American jury system is an essential bulwark against tyranny, oppression, and prosecutorial abuses. For that reason, prosecutors in the Jim Crow South routinely excluded Black Americans from participating as jurors in criminal trials, especially in cases with Black defendants. So prevalent was the problem that the phrase “all-white jury” entered the American lexicon as a shorthand phrase for manifestly unjust and unreliable trials in the South.

Black jury participation increased after the demise of de jure racial........

© New Republic