The U.S. Supreme Court has twice reversed Mississippi death-row convictions in the past seven years on the basis of racial bias in jury selection. Counsel for death row inmate Willie Manning say his conviction should be the next one overturned.
In a filing Friday with the Mississippi Supreme Court, Manning’s legal team argued that decisions by the nation’s high court in the Terry Pitchford and Curtis Flowers cases enable Manning to seek post-conviction relief.
The motion was filed eight days after Mississippi Today published its investigation that uncovered new evidence suggesting Manning’s innocence.
On May 28, U.S. Supreme Court justices reversed the capital murder conviction of Terry Pitchford in Mississippi. In a 5-4 decision, they concluded the trial judge failed to follow all the steps required to make sure that then-District Attorney Doug Evans was not discriminating on the basis of race when he struck all four potential Black jurors.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the judge “erroneously omitted” part of the inquiry detailed in the court’s Batson v. Kentucky 1986 decision, which banned the use of jury strikes to remove potential jurors on the basis of race.
The Pitchford opinion followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 decision that threw out the conviction of Curtis Flowers, who was on Mississippi’s death row. Evans also prosecuted that case.
In Flowers’ first four trials, Evans tried to strike all 36 Black prospective jurors. “The State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Manning, who is Black, went on trial in 1994 for the 1992 killings of two Mississippi State University students, Tiffany Miller and Jon Steckler, who were both white.
In that capital murder trial, 28 of 85 potential jurors were Black, but only two served on the jury.
After then-District Attorney Forrest Allgood exercised seven of his 11 strikes against Black Mississippians, defense lawyer Mark Williamson objected, saying, “I would at this time like to interpose an objection to the State just arbitrarily striking every black as he’s gotten down to it.”
As a result of these strikes, Williamson continued, Manning does not have “a jury comprised of his peers.” At the time, white Mississippians made up 69% of Starkville’s population; they made up 83% of the Oktibbeha County jury that heard Manning’s case.
Asked by Circuit Judge Lee J. Howard to provide race-neutral reasons for striking jurors, Allgood responded that one Black man wore gold chains, “a ring in his ear” and “sunglasses hung in his shirt.” The prosecutor challenged another African American because he lived in a neighborhood similar to Brookville Garden Apartments, where many low-income Black residents live in Starkville.
Other reasons provided by the prosecutor to strike Black potential jurors? One “watches a tremendous amount of TV,” “made eye contact” with the defense counsel and was “wishy-washy” on capital punishment. But the juror actually said she could “go with the death penalty” during questioning.
But Allgood did not strike white potential jurors who held similar views on capital punishment. One white woman even said in her questionnaire that she could not impose the death penalty, only changing her answer during questioning that is part of jury selection. She still served on the jury.
The prosecutor also excused his strikes of Black potential jurors by saying they read “liberal magazines.” Those magazines were Jet and Ebony — two publications focused on Black news and culture. In the recent motion, Manning’s counsel wrote that this reason “reeks of racial motivation.”
The magazines, Allgood said, included “a lot” of articles “espousing O.J.’s innocence” in the June 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
Jet published 15 articles on Simpson in the months following the killings, but none of them declared Simpson’s innocence. Ebony featured people’s opinions on the crime, but the magazine didn’t weigh in on who committed the murders.
When striking one Black potential juror — Christi LaMarque Robertson — Allgood repeated that Robertson was someone who “read those same magazines … which has had those articles on O.J. Simpson.” She read Time and Newsweek, according to her questionnaire. White candidates read the same magazines and wound up on the jury.
Allgood struck two Black potential jurors because they were “unemployed.” In reality, one worked at Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg. The other was disabled.
In contrast, four white potential jurors wrote “unemployed” or left the question blank in their questionnaires. One of them served on the jury.
The prosecutor struck a potential Black juror because a family member had been convicted of a crime. But Allgood raised no objections with three white potential jurors who had been arrested.
In the motion Friday, Manning’s counsel called these reasons “either inconsistent with the record or equally applicable to several white jurors.”
After being challenged, Allgood questioned why the defense’s strikes were all aimed at white potential jurors.
“There weren’t any blacks left to strike except one,” Williamson responded.
Williamson cried foul and asked the judge to strike the jury and declare a mistrial. Howard rejected that request, later saying, “All reasons stated by the State for the exercise of its peremptory challenges were for a race-neutral reason.”
But Manning’s counsel argued that, just like in the Pitchford case, the trial judge had “failed to undertake a meaningful review of the prosecutor’s reasons,” quickly moving on after he professed them. “In one sense,” the motion reads, “the trial judge’s treatment of Batson was even more egregious than in Pitchford.”
This filing is an additional challenge to Manning’s standing motion in front of the Mississippi Supreme Court.
In September 2024, his lawyers asked for a rehearing after this court upheld Manning’s death sentence in a 5-4 decision, clearing the way for his execution.
According to court observers, justices usually rule on such rehearings within 60 days. It’s been more than 700 days, and a decision has yet to be made.
The attorney general’s office has previously said that Manning’s Batson claim is barred because the courts have already ruled on the issue. Manning’s counsel called this justification “unreasonable.”
The state has yet to respond to the most recent motion, but Attorney General Lynn Fitch has previously called on justices to schedule the execution. “What he is doing is a blatant attempt to delay his lawful execution,” Fitch wrote in a 2023 brief.
In a brief filed by the Innocence Project, ACLU and the NAACP on behalf of Manning, lawyers wrote that “the jury selection for Mr. Manning’s trial was replete with blatant racially motivated strikes that could never survive a Batson challenge today.”
“Mr. Manning never stood a chance to prove his innocence even before he entered a courtroom.”
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