The Supreme Court issued a surprisingly good decision in a racial jury-selection case on Thursday. In a 5–4 decision joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberals, Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained how two Mississippi courts violated the Constitution by allowing criminal prosecutors to strike Black jurors from the courtroom, then preventing the defense’s lawyers from objecting to the strikes. The ruling, Pitchford v. Cain, is an important victory for Terry Pitchford and others like him who have been overprosecuted by Southern state governments. But how the opinion came to be is also a story of three others: Kavanaugh, who has a long history of being unusually clear-eyed in this area of the law, going back to his law school days; a former Mississippi prosecutor who has a sordid past with the Black citizenry he’s supposed to protect; and Roberts, who, despite ruling for decades on racial issues, can’t seem to decide whether racism exists.

Pitchford was a Black teenager who, in 2004, robbed a grocery store in Mississippi. He was joined in the robbery by another Black teenager, Eric Bullins. After they were arrested, the differences between Bullins and Pitchford proved key in the way the cases played out. Bullins was 16, and Pitchford was 18; it was Bullins, not Pitchford, who shot and killed the white store owner during the robbery. As is common, the two were tried separately, and Bullins reached a plea deal that led to a 20-year sentence for homicide. But even though Pitchford hadn’t taken the shots that killed the store owner, the state charged him with capital murder and sought the death penalty.

Jury selection can win or lose a case in racially charged criminal matters. That’s why it’s so important that in 1986’s Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court affirmed that the 14th Amendment bars prosecutors from selecting or striking jurors based on race. When Pitchford’s case went to trial, Mississippi prosecutor Doug Evans tried to use his allotted peremptory strikes to remove four of the five Black candidates from the jury pool. Pitchford’s defense lawyer attempted to object to the prosecution’s juror strikes for being racially motivated, raising what’s called a Batson objection. After........

© Slate