Judge overturns Mississippi death penalty case

GREENVILLE, Miss. — A federal judge has overturned the death penalty conviction of a Mississippi man, finding that a judge did not give the man's attorney enough of an opportunity to argue that the prosecutor dismissed black jurors for discriminatory reasons.

U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills ruled Tuesday that the state of Mississippi must grant Terry Pitchford a new trial on murder charges.

Mills wrote that his ruling was partly motivated by what he called former prosecutor Doug Evans' history of discrimination against black jurors.

A spokesperson for Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said Sunday that the state plans to appeal. Online prison records show Pitchford remained on death row Sunday at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman.

Mills ordered the state to retry the 37-year-old man within six months, saying he should be released from custody if he is not retried by then.

Pitchford was charged with murder in the fatal 2004 robbery of the Crossroads Grocery, a store just outside Grenada, in northern Mississippi. Pitchford and his friend Eric Bullins went to the store to rob it. Bullins shot store owner Reuben Britt three times, fatally wounding him, while Pitchford said he fired shots into the floor, court documents show.

Police found Britt's gun in a car at Pitchford's home. Pitchford, then 18, admitted his role and said he had also tried to rob the store 10 days earlier.

But Mills said jury selection before the 2006 trial was seriously flawed because the judge did not give Pitchford's attorney enough of a chance to challenge the state's reasons for striking black jurors.

To claim that jurors were improperly excluded, a defendant must show that discriminatory intent motivated the strikes. In Pitchford's case, judges and attorneys reduced the original jury pool of 61 white and 35 black members to one with 36 white and five black members, in part because so many black jurors objected to sentencing Pitchford to death. The prosecutors then struck four more black jurors, leaving only one black person on the final jury.

Prosecutors can strike black jurors for race-neutral reasons, and prosecutors at the trial gave reasons for removing all four. But Mills found that the judge never gave the defense a chance to appropriately refute the state's justification.

“This court cannot ignore the idea that Pitchford was seemingly given no opportunity to rebut the State's testimony and prove purposeful discrimination,” Mills wrote.

On appeal, Pitchford's attorneys argued that some of the reasons for dismissing the jurors were weak and that the state did not raise similar objections to white jurors with similar issues.

Mills also wrote that his decision was influenced by Evans' prosecution of another black man, who is white. Curtis Flowers was tried six times for the deaths of four people. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Evans had wrongly excluded black people from Flowers' juries, overturning the man's conviction and death sentence.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh called it a “relentless, determined attempt to rid the jury of black individuals.”

In reporting on the Flowers case, US public media's 'In the Dark' uncovered what it described as a long history of racial bias in Evans' jury selection.

Mississippi dropped charges against Flowers in September 2020, after Flowers was released from custody and Evans turned the case over to the attorney general.

Mills wrote that the Flowers case itself proves nothing. But he said the Mississippi Supreme Court should have examined that history when reviewing Pitchford's appeal.

“The court merely believes that it should have been included in a 'totality of the circumstances' analysis of the issue,” Mills wrote.