U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills ruled Tuesday that the state of Mississippi must give Terry Pitchford a new trial on capital murder charges.
GREENVILLE, Miss. (AP) — A federal judge has overturned the death penalty conviction of a Mississippi man, finding a trial judge didn’t give the man’s lawyer enough chance to argue that the prosecution was dismissing Black jurors for discriminatory reasons.
U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills ruled Tuesday that the state of
On appeal, Pitchford’s lawyers argued that some of the reasons for rejecting the jurors were flimsy and that the state didn’t make similar objections to white jurors with similar issues.
Mills also wrote that his decision was influenced by the prosecution of another Black man by Evans, who is white. Curtis Flowers was tried six times in the shooting deaths of four people. The U.S. Supreme Court found Evans had improperly excluded Black people from Flowers’ juries, overturning the man’s conviction and death sentence.
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh called it a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.”
In reporting on the Flowers case, American Public Media’s “In the Dark” found what it described as a long history of racial bias in jury selection by Evans.
Mississippi dropped charges against Flowers in September 2020, after Flowers was released from custody and Evans turned the case over to the state attorney general.
Mills wrote that, on its own, the Flowers case doesn’t prove anything. But he said that the Mississippi Supreme Court should have examined that history in considering 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.
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