A Mississippi death penalty jury was seated. With one Black juror. ...Middle East

One hundred and twenty-six people gathered at the Grenada County Courthouse on Feb. 6, 2006, for jury selection in the capital murder trial of Terry Pitchford, a 20 year-old Black man who stood accused of killing a beloved white convenience store owner. Defense attorneys and prosecutors worked their way through the potential jurors, narrowing the number to 96. By then, Black people made up about 37% of the jury pool, slightly less than the overall percentage of Black residents in Grenada County.

After a judge removes prospective jurors for specific reasons, such as bias or being unable to serve because of work, prosecutors and defense attorneys are given a number of peremptory challenges, or “strikes,” to dismiss a prospective juror without providing a specific reason. There are restrictions, however. The 1986 Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky prohibited strikes based on race, finding they violated a defendant’s 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law.

Following challenges for cause, the number of Black people available to be considered for jury service in Pitchford’s case narrowed dramatically. After striking a white woman, Doug Evans, then the district attorney for Mississippi’s 5th Circuit Court District, struck four Black prospective jurors, one after the other, leaving just one Black person to serve. 

Defense attorney Alison Steiner objected, raising what’s known as a Batson challenge. At the time, Steiner worked for the state’s Office of Capital Defense Counsel and was helping Pitchford’s lead attorney conduct jury selection in the case.

“This is already a disproportionately white jury for the population of this county,” she told Judge Joseph Loper. “It appears to be a pattern of disproportionately challenging African-American jurors.” 

Loper asked Evans to provide reasons for his strikes. Evans said a Black woman named Linda Lee was 15 minutes late in returning to court after lunch and, according to law enforcement, had mental problems.

“They have had numerous calls to her house and said she obviously has mental problems,” he said.

Evans said that Christopher Tillmon, a Black man, had a brother convicted of manslaughter, and he didn’t want a juror with relatives convicted of offenses similar to the charges against Pitchford. Patricia Tidwell, a Black woman, had a brother with a criminal conviction and was, according to police, “a known drug user.” Finally, Carlos Ward, a Black man, was struck, in part, for being too similar to Pitchford.

“One, he had no opinion on the death penalty,” Evans said of Ward. “He has a two-year-old child. He has never been married. He has numerous speeding violations that we are aware of. The reason that I do not want him as a juror is he is too closely related to the defendant.”

It was the first time Steiner had faced Evans in a courtroom, though she would meet him again, two years later, when she was a defense attorney in the fifth trial of Curtis Flowers, a Black man accused of murdering four people inside a furniture store in Winona. Evans didn’t state the most obvious similarity between the two men out loud — they are both Black men — but to Steiner, the message was clear.

“There was nothing subtle about Doug Evans,” Steiner, who is now retired, recalled. “He didn’t have to dog whistle. He just basically said it.”

Under Batson, Evans didn’t need to prove his myriad claims about the potential jurors through police records, sworn testimony or other evidence. Judge Loper was, however, required to evaluate Evans’ reasons for striking them and determine if they were race-neutral. He swiftly accepted all of Evans’ four strikes without asking Steiner for rebuttal.

Batson Challenge Database

Mississippi Batson cases by county

All Cases ✕

Steiner was taken aback. “I tried to press it as best I could,” she said. “I did what I thought the Supreme Court told me to do, to try to preserve an objection.”

Though jury selection can often take weeks in a capital case, Pitchford’s jury was chosen in just one day. After the jury was empaneled, Steiner objected, once again, under Batson. “This county is approximately, what, 40 percent” Black, she told the judge. 

“I don’t know about the racial makeup,” Loper said. “But I will note for the record there is one regular member of the panel that is Black, African-American race.” 

“And only one,” Steiner said.

When the trial began, Pitchford’s twin brother, Perry, sat next to his mother and his brother’s girlfriend. They watched the jury file into the courtroom. “There was one Black person,” Perry remembered thinking. “At that moment, I just knew he was going to get the death penalty.”

The prosecutor explained that [the juror] had been stricken because she appeared to be inattentive and because she had red-dyed hair. The trial judge stated that the claim of inattentiveness should have been brought to the court’s attention earlier, but he accepted this and the juror’s appearance as valid race-neutral reasons for her exclusion.

— Jackson v. Crockett

Terry Pitchford’s trial lasted about two days. He and his co-defendant Eric Bullin were charged with the Nov. 7, 2004, murder of Reuben Britt, the 67-year-old owner of Crossroads Grocery, a convenience store on the edge of Grenada County. Pitchford was 18 at the time of the offense; Bullin was just 16. Britt’s family, friends and customers knew him as a funny, generous man who gave free gas and food to those who needed it and loved to play pranks on his customers, like hiding rubber snakes in the minnow box.

Prosecutors alleged that after Britt was shot to death, the perpetrators stole off with the cash register and whatever money they could grab from a shattered game machine in the back of the store. They said Britt was shot by two guns. He died from three shots fired from a .22 caliber firearm, according to an autopsy, while small pellets from a pistol filled with “rat shot,” a kind of ammunition used to kill rodents, struck his arm, abdomen, chest and thigh. The murder weapon was never found. Neither was the cash register.

At trial, jurors heard testimony from jailhouse informants that Pitchford confessed to the murder, and that investigators discovered a .38, loaded with rat shot, in his car the day of the murder, which prosecutors alleged was Britt’s gun. They also heard Pitchford’s statement to investigators that it was Bullin, not him, who killed Britt: Bullin shot Britt with the .22, Pitchford said, while he fired the .38 into the floor. Though they couldn’t prove who fired the fatal shots, prosecutors argued that Pitchford was the ringleader of the crime. He not only conspired to rob Britt, they told jurors, he intended to kill him.

Bullin didn’t testify at Pitchford’s trial. On March 20, 2005, while incarcerated at the Grenada County jail awaiting trial for Britt’s murder, he and another inmate brutally beat a man named Kenneth Kendall over a cigarette. Kendall later died from his injuries. That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments forbid imposition of the death penalty on people who were younger than 18 when their crimes were committed. That meant Bullin couldn’t be put to death. 

Bullin received a 20-year sentence for killing Kendall after pleading guilty to manslaughter. Two years later, Evans recommended that Bullin be permitted to plead guilty to manslaughter for killing Britt. Bullin received, in effect, a 10-year sentence for the murder: Judge Loper sentenced him to 20 years, with 10 years served concurrently, or at the same time, as the sentence he received for killing Kendall. 

The jury sentenced Pitchford to death. 

The youngest man on death row 

One year after his conviction, in 2007, as Pitchford was adjusting to the reality of being the youngest person on Mississippi’s death row, the state Supreme Court reversed a case prosecuted by Doug Evans, one that would go on to define how justice is done in Mississippi. Evans had tried Curtis Flowers three times for the murder of four people inside the Tardy Furniture store in Winona in 1996. Each time, an all-white or majority-white jury sentenced him to death. Flowers’ team appealed after each conviction, twice winning reversal on grounds that Evans had committed prosecutorial misconduct. After his third trial, Flowers appealed again, this time arguing that Evans struck Black jurors in violation of Batson. 

In 2007, Mississippi’s Supreme Court ordered a new trial. The Flowers case, wrote Justice James Graves Jr., then the court’s only Black justice, presented the court with as strong an example of racial discrimination as it had ever seen in the context of Batson. Evans, he noted, “exercised all fifteen of his peremptory strikes on African-Americans, and the lone African-American who ultimately sat on Flowers’ jury was seated after the State ran out of peremptory challenges.”

“Such a result cannot be considered ‘happenstance,’” he added.

During Flowers’ fourth trial, in November 2007, the jury was composed of seven white people and five Black people. When the jury couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict, a mistrial was declared. Evans, undeterred, tried Flowers two more times. After another mistrial, Flowers was convicted again by a majority-white jury and sentenced to death. 

In the spring of 2018, investigative reporter Madeleine Baran covered the Flowers saga for the American Public Media podcast series “In The Dark.” An original analysis of court data conducted by “In The Dark” offered seemingly irrefutable proof of discrimination by prosecutors: data from more than 200 trials held in Mississippi’s 5th Circuit Court District between 1992 and 2017 revealed that Evans and his office struck 50% of eligible Black jurors and only 11% of white jurors. Almost overnight, as millions of listeners tuned in to “In The Dark,” Evans became known as one of America’s most notorious prosecutors.

Researchers working with Flowers’ post-conviction team also found that in 13 capital cases tried by Evans, including Pitchford’s, the prosecutor struck 65% of eligible Black jurors, and just 8% of eligible white jurors. Then, in 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Flowers’ conviction on grounds that Evans had, once again, discriminated against Black potential jurors in his sixth trial. Flowers was released from prison, this time for good.

“Stretching across Flowers’ first four trials, the State employed its peremptory strikes to remove as many black prospective jurors as possible,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the majority’s opinion. “The State appeared to proceed as if Batson had never been decided. The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury.”

For a moment, it seemed that Batson was triumphant: a historic victory at the U.S. Supreme Court delivered by one of its most conservative justices and a spotlight in a popular podcast. But that moment turned out to be fleeting — especially for Terry Pitchford. 

Despite its 2007 ruling in Flowers, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld Pitchford’s conviction just three years later, in part on grounds that Pitchford waived his Batson objection when Steiner didn’t rebut Evans’ reasons for striking jurors. Steiner, who also represented Pitchford on appeal, provided the court with additional argument that Evans’ strikes were discriminatory, including an analysis of disparate treatment of white and Black prospective jurors. It didn’t matter, the court ruled: It wouldn’t consider argument not presented at trial. 

The ruling meant that efforts by attorneys to later investigate and argue patterns of discrimination by prosecutors would be meaningless on appeal, said Tucker Carrington, associate dean of clinical programs at the University of Mississippi Law School and director of the Mississippi Innocence Project. “In one fell swoop,” he said, “The Court did away with Batson.” 

PITCHFORD v. STATE (2010) 

Pitchford then sought post-conviction relief in federal court. His appeal focused on several claims, including that he received ineffective assistance of counsel and that Evans violated Batson. In his appeal, Pitchford included evidence of disparate treatment of prospective Black jurors, as well as an affidavit detailing an interview with a white juror who heard his case. The juror, who knew the victim’s family, told an investigator she felt that Pitchford’s lead defense attorney, who is Black, was unprofessional and did not seem prepared. He spoke with “Ebonics,” she said, adding that his accent was hard to understand, even “irritating.” The other attorney, who is white, was more articulate and “aristocratic,” she said. 

In 2023, a federal judge granted Pitchford relief on his Batson claim and ordered that the state retry him within 180 days or release him. “At the time of Pitchford’s trial, Batson was well-settled law that the trial court was bound to uphold and apply,” Judge Michael P. Mills, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote. “But this Court cannot ignore the notion that Pitchford was seemingly given no chance to rebut the State’s explanations and prove purposeful discrimination.”

But early last year, the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, ruling that Pitchford’s Batson claim didn’t overcome the standard set by the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Under AEDPA, which gutted habeas corpus protections, federal judges can only overturn state court decisions in extremely narrow circumstances. In Pitchford’s case, the 5th Circuit affirmed the trial court’s handling of Pitchford’s Batson challenge, and also ruled that Mississippi’s Supreme Court didn’t have to consider its previous ruling in Flowers when it decided Pitchford’s claim. 

At the end of this month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear Pitchford’s claim that his con­sti­tu­tion­al rights were vio­lat­ed because of race dis­crim­i­na­tion dur­ing jury selec­tion. It is the third Mississippi Batson case, and the second prosecuted by Evans, to draw scrutiny from the nation’s highest court.

Whatever the court decides, its ruling will send a message to a state that has continued to backslide on Batson, despite years of warnings from both state and federal judges and an international spotlight from “In The Dark.” In 2023, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Mississippi Supreme Court “intends to carry on with business as usual, no matter what this Court said in Flowers.” Last year, Mississippi Supreme Court Presiding Justice Leslie King, the court’s sole Black justice, wrote in a fiery statement in the case of Black death row inmate Stephen Powers that the court has a “demonstrated hostility to upholding Batson protections with regard to Black jurors” and “has created a situation in which Powers cannot receive a fair hearing on his Batson claims in the state of Mississippi.”

Inside Mississippi’s ‘muscular approach’ to denying Batson claims 

Justice King’s claim of the impossibility of fair hearings on Batson claims in Mississippi is borne out by a Mississippi Today analysis of criminal appeals considered by the Mississippi Supreme Court, the Mississippi Court of Appeals and each of Mississippi’s federal districts between 2015 and 2025. The analysis identified approximately 60 appeals and petitions seeking post-conviction relief where Batson claims were raised, including 18 heard by the Mississippi Supreme Court.

According to the review, over the last decade the Mississippi Supreme Court hasn’t provided relief in a single Batson claim, allowing prosecutors’ strikes of Black prospective jurors to stand in every case it’s considered, even in the wake of Flowers. 

Batson Challenge Database

Mississippi Batson cases

Yet when it comes to white prospective jurors, Mississippi’s highest court may be more willing to enforce the law. In cases in which a trial court found a Batson violation for strikes of white jurors, state Supreme Court justices affirmed the trial court’s ruling at least four times over the last decade.

The filings, which include an overview of the case and the court’s analysis of the claims made by a defendant, provide just a snapshot of how Batson challenges unfold at the trial level: Only a fraction of criminal convictions are reviewed by appeals courts. But they do provide insight into how Batson fares in Mississippi’s trial courts. 

According to the Mississippi Today review, Mississippi prosecutors struck Black prospective jurors for myriad reasons, from employment to their appearance.

In one case, a prosecutor struck a Black man who worked as an IT manager because he said IT employees weren’t “perceptive,” while another struck a Black woman for working at a parochial school. A Black woman who worked at the Mississippi Department of Health was struck because she “failed to indicate how long she had been employed” on her juror questionnaire.

In another case, a prosecutor struck a Black woman for having “red dyed hair” and in another, a prosecutor struck a Black man because he had “a ponytail, a sort of strange hair design.” That prosecutor told the judge he was concerned the juror might identify too closely with the defendant, who also was of a similar age. “Both have unusual hair styles,” the prosecutor said. 

Prosecutors struck Black jurors who, they said, seemed angry, irritated or inattentive. A Black woman was struck because the prosecutor didn’t like her “vibe.” Another, who worked a night shift before showing up to jury selection, was struck for being “fidgety” and looking “angry.” Another was struck because she “frowned a lot.” 

Black people were struck from juries for having negative interactions with law enforcement, having incarcerated relatives, living in a “high-crime area” and for not having a college degree. In many cases, Black people were struck from juries simply for having the same last name as someone convicted of a crime. Prosecutors told judges that local law enforcement provided information to them that struck jurors had family members convicted of crimes, were related to known “bootleggers,” or were “known in the community to drink a lot.” 

One juror was “nonresponsive in questioning” and had“a ponytail, a sort of strange hair design.” His “ageis very much in line with the age of the defendant,” andthe prosecutor was “concerned that he may identify withhim and both have unusual hairstyles.”

— Steve Knox v. Burl Cain

In that case, the prosecutor said police “would be surprised if she’s not drinking right now.” 

They also struck Black jurors because of where they lived. In one case, a Black woman was struck because she managed a convenience store in the same area where the defendant resided. In another, a Black woman was struck because she lived in Lumberton, a small, predominantly African-American community near Hattiesburg.

“We’ve prosecuted several people for drugs in that area,” the prosecutor told the trial judge when asked to provide a race-neutral reason for striking the juror—including, the prosecutor continued, several people with the juror’s last name. “It’s got everything to do with her relatives and where she lives,” the prosecutor said. 

In some cases, prosecutors rejected Black jurors while accepting white jurors with similar qualities. A prosecutor struck a Black man, in part, for being married to a nurse but accepted a white female nurse as a juror.

Defense attorneys also struck white prospective jurors for reasons that, on their face, seemed trivial. In one case, a white woman was struck because defense counsel “didn’t have a good feeling” about her. In another, a defense attorney struck a white juror because he was a cattle farmer who owned “a lot of property.” 

Mississippi Today identified only two cases where a trial judge determined a strike against a Black juror was discriminatory. But trial judges responded differently in cases where a defense attorney attempted to strike a white juror. In at least 11 cases, a trial judge ruled that a strike against a white juror was discriminatory and allowed the white juror to serve. Some of the same reasons given by defense attorneys for striking white jurors that were found by judges to violate Batson were, in cases involving Black jurors, found to be race neutral by other judges. Body language, demeanor and employment were all cited by trial judges as discriminatory reasons for striking white jurors.

Mississippi Today’s analysis identified 18 opinions on Batson claims issued by the Mississippi Supreme Court between 2015 and 2025. The opinions stemmed from appeals filed by defendants convicted of felony crimes, ranging from possession of a controlled substance to capital murder. Seven of those defendants were sentenced to death. One, David Cox, was executed in 2021. Black defendants made up about 78% of the cases overall, and 70% of the defendants on death row. 

In each case involving struck Black jurors that it considered, the Mississippi Supreme Court sided with trial judge’s rulings that a prosecutor’s strike was race-neutral. 

Over that same time period, the court considered at least six cases where a prosecutor challenged a defense attorney’s strike of a juror, also known as a “reverse-Batson” challenge. Five appeals involving reverse-Baston challenges examined by Mississippi Today involved the striking of white prospective jurors by defense attorneys. In cases in which a trial court found a Batson violation for strikes of white jurors, supreme court justices affirmed the trial court at least four times over the last decade.

The law doesn’t require prosecutors to prove their claims, nor do their reasons need to be credible to satisfy Batson. Like all appeals courts, the Mississippi Supreme Court also gives “great deference” to a trial court’s decisions.

“Indeed, we will not overrule a trial court on a Batson ruling unless the record indicates that the ruling was clearly erroneous or against the overwhelming weight of evidence,” state justices wrote in a 2020 opinion in a case where a prosecutor used all his allowed peremptory strikes against Black jurors. 

In that case, Justice King took his colleagues to task in a dissent. “A deferential standard of review is not (and should not be) a rubber stamp on trial court decisions; yet, that is how this Court has wielded it in Batson cases,” King wrote. “And prosecutors seem adept at making increasingly better excuses for striking African-American jurors, actions for which this Court has shown no interest in holding the State accountable.”

In 2024, Justice King published his own accounting of the Court’s Batson record. According to King’s analysis, the Court reviewed 121 race-based Batson challenges between 2024 and 1986, the year Batson was decided. During that period, it has ruled in favor of struck Black jurors only five times. Conversely, in cases in which a trial court found a Batson violation for the strikes of white jurors, the Court affirmed the judges’ rulings in 12 cases.

Taken together, the data from both Mississippi Today and Justice King show a court system in Mississippi that is much more likely to uphold the exclusion of Black jurors, while affirming trial judges’ decisions to keep white people on juries.

Since Batson, the Mississippi Supreme Court has “applied a muscular approach to denying claims,” Carrington said. “Not only did they fail to meet the challenge, they exacerbated what was already a known pathology by making it lawful to discriminate against Black prospective jurors.”

“I employed a bunch of I.T. guys at one time. I.T. people aren’t very perceptive to me. I feel — and some of your high-level engineers and I.T. guys, they — they require a lot of data that — that they just don’t get in trials, and they — and they fail to apply common sense to many of the instructions. That’s been my experience.”

— Bell v. State of Mississippi

Mississippi’s resistance to enforcing Batson is what some attorneys and legal experts feared might happen after Batson was decided. Even then, the U.S. Supreme Court’s first Black justice, Thurgood Marshall, was skeptical that it could end discrimination in jury selection. In a separate concurrence, he wrote that only by eliminating peremptory strikes entirely could that happen. “Any prosecutor,” he wrote, “can easily assert facially neutral reasons for striking a juror, and trial courts are ill equipped to second guess those reasons.” 

Attorney Stephen Bright, former longtime director of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, said that after Batson, “prosecutors could have gathered their staff together and said, ‘Okay, guys, gig is up. We can’t keep discriminating now. We have to start selecting jurors, and we have to learn how to try our cases, to the whole community.’ But that’s not what happened.”

Less than a decade after Batson was decided, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that brought Marshall’s fears to pass. In Purkett v. Elem, the Court ruled that reasons given by prosecutors for striking jurors don’t have to be persuasive, or even plausible, to be considered race-neutral. That was the end of Batson, Bright said. 

Since then, legal scholars have increasingly criticized the limits of Batson and the use of peremptory strikes generally, with some, like Marshall, arguing that they should be abolished. Touro law professor Taurus Myhand recently argued that peremptory challenges are “counterproductive to the goal of empaneling fair and representative juries” and reinforce “stereotypes and assumptions regarding race, religion, gender, and a number of other characteristics used by litigants to guess how a prospective juror will decide a case.” 

Several states have also implemented Batson reforms. In 2018, Washington’s Supreme Court enacted a rule intended to make it more difficult for attorneys to strike jurors based on race. In 2022, Arizona became the first state to ban peremptory challenges. In Mississippi, however, state-level reform has largely failed: Democratic state Sen. Derrick T. Simmons, who is an attorney, introduced Batson-reform legislation in 2021 and 2024. The bills died in committee both times. 

Bright, who has tried capital cases in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, successfully defended three Batson cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. In one of those cases, Timothy Foster, a Black, intellectually-disabled 18-year-old, was sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Georgia in 1987, after Batson was decided. The Supreme Court reversed his conviction in 2016. While working on his appeal, Bright and his team discovered lists written by prosecutors that highlighted Black prospective jurors, denoting their race with “B#1” and “B#2,” and writing phrases like “NO” and “NO. No Black church” next to their names. 

“There are lots of stories like that, and most of them are never told, because nobody ever gets the file,” Bright said. 

Indeed, in ongoing litigation in North Carolina over Batson, attorneys have discovered decades old notes written by prosecutors where Black jurors are referred to in derogatory language like “thugs” and “blk. wino.” Cedric Ricks, a Texas man sentenced to death for murdering his girlfriend and her child, was executed Wednesday night. His attorneys discovered jury selection lists showing that prosecutors made annotations emphasizing jurors’ race and gender, with notes like “B/F” beside their names.

A killing at the Crossroads 

Terry and Perry Pitchford grew up about a half mile from Crossroads Grocery, in a part of Grenada County they called the “country.” The twins were just 10 years old when their father died from kidney cancer, and it hit Terry hard. While Perry was quiet and obedient, Terry acted out, often drawing the ire of their mother, Shirley Jackson. Jackson went on to marry a man who was an abusive alcoholic and prone to fits of rage.

As the abuse at home escalated, Terry struggled academically, socially and mentally. He was held back twice in elementary school and never completed another year of school after he was expelled in eighth grade, when he punched the taillights of a school bus after being jumped by a group of kids. At 16 he’d attempted suicide. A psychiatrist who evaluated him in preparation for trial would determine that Pitchford had a history of head injuries and suffered from cognitive impairment.

There was one bright spot in his life, however. At around 13 years old, he met a girl named Dominique Hogan at church. Hogan lived across town, in a neighborhood called Tie Plant. As Perry stayed laser-focused on school and sports, Pitchford spent more time in Tie Plant and fell into a new friend group that included Bullin. “He was rough,” Perry remembered. “If you were his best friend, or if you were friends with him, you might get caught up in something, with whatever he’s doing.”

“Sometimes it hurts, that we were both raised in the same environment and he went the way he went,” Perry, who went on to work in the aerospace industry, added. “It got to the point where when we went out somewhere, I’d stay away from Terry and his crowd. I’d be on a whole separate side of town.” 

Pitchford and Hogan dated throughout her time in high school. She and her siblings were raised by their grandmother, she said, and there were things that other kids took for granted that she couldn’t afford. Pitchford, though, made sure she could participate: He paid for her senior photographs and made sure she could go to prom. “He really played a big role in my life,” Hogan said. 

When Hogan got pregnant at 17, she and Pitchford decided to get married. “He bought me a ring, proposed to me. We were getting a place, our own apartment,” she said. Pitchford was excited about becoming a father, Hogan said, and was by her side throughout her pregnancy. “He was there from the beginning to the end,” she said. 

“[She] seemed irritated the entire time whether it was the state asking questions or the defense. Her demeanor was just one of irritation and not comfortable being here. So the State just didn’t get a good vibe. I did not get a good vibe.”

— Dille v. State of Mississippi

The end came far sooner than Hogan imagined. At around 7:30 in the morning on Nov. 7, 2004, a man and his son stopped at Crossroads Grocery on their way to go rabbit hunting. The hunter got a Sprite and a honey bun, and walked up to the counter. That’s when he saw Reuben Britt lying on the floor. 

Investigators with the Grenada County Sheriff’s Office knew right away that they were dealing with a robbery gone wrong. Investigator Greg Conley noticed an apparent.38 revolver with a brown handle on the counter, next to where the cash register should have been. When he examined Britt, he saw he had two different types of wounds: regular bullet wounds and wounds consistent with “a lot of little pellets.” 

That morning, investigators marked bullet casings with Styrofoam cups, took photos and collected .22 shell casings. Shortly after, Grenada County Sheriff Alton Strider told Britt’s family they could clean up the store. Employees of the state crime lab arrived later that night, 13 hours after Britt had been killed. By that time, the scene had been cleaned, the .38 lying on the counter was gone, and forensic technicians recovered little additional evidence, aside from another .22 shell casing, some broken glass, several silver pellets and blue plastic fragments. 

The investigation quickly unfolded. A man who worked nearby told investigators that he’d previously run off two men who looked like they were trying to rob the store. One of those men was Quincy Bullin, Eric Bullin’s cousin. Quincy told Conley that Pitchford had been involved in the previous robbery attempt.

Police eventually knocked on Shirley Jackson’s door, looking for Pitchford. She nearly fell over when investigators told her that they suspected her son killed Britt. Her boys had grown up helping him around the store in exchange for money or candy. “Mr. Britt knew all of us,” Jackson said. “He was my friend.”

Jackson agreed to let investigators search Pitchford’s car, which she co-owned. They found a black-handled, .38 special revolver loaded with rat shot and arrested him. Later, when Jackson visited her son at the sheriff’s office, Conley pulled her aside. “I was standing in the hallway, they had him in the back,” she recalled. “That’s when Greg Conley told me, he said that the gun that Terry had was not the gun that killed Mr. Britt.”

“I’ll never forget that,” she said.

‘He clearly did research on all the Black jurors’

Pitchford went to trial after he turned down a plea deal. According to a post-conviction filing in Pitchford’s case, his defense team didn’t adequately investigate his case and put on little mitigation — information about a defendant’s social, educational and psychological history that would convince a jury to vote for a life sentence instead of death at the penalty phase of the trial. Ray Carter, an attorney with the state’s Office of Capital Defense Counsel, was managing nine other capital cases at the time, a caseload far beyond what’s recommended for constitutionally effective representation of defendants facing the death penalty. Judge Loper, however, denied Carter’s request to postpone the trial. 

During jury selection, Doug Evans initially tried to remove Linda Lee, one of the Black prospective jurors, during challenges for cause. Lee, who didn’t have a car, was late in returning to court after lunch. Though other jurors were also late, according to the trial transcript, Evans said she showed a “complete disregard for the whole court system” and asked that she be removed. Judge Loper kept her on, however, saying “she is trying real hard to be here and fulfill her civic duty as a juror.” 

When it came time for strikes, Evans said police told him that both Lee and Patricia Tidwell were unfit to serve on the jury: Lee because she had “mental problems” and Tidwell, a Black woman who supported the death penalty, because she was a “known drug user” and was related to someone with a criminal conviction. Tidwell was the only juror Evans questioned about criminal prosecutions of family members during voir dire, when attorneys have an opportunity to question jurors. Evans asked Tidwell if she was related to a man with her last name and she responded that he was her cousin. When Evans struck her, he told Loper that her brother had previously been convicted of sexual battery and was also charged in a shooting case. 

Christopher Tillmon reported his brother’s criminal conviction for manslaughter on his jury questionnaire. Other qualities, though, might have made him an ideal juror for the prosecution: He was an employed college graduate, strongly supported the death penalty and had previously worked for a correctional facility. Evans didn’t ask Tillmon about his brother’s criminal history during voir dire, but he struck him for it, and ultimately accepted two white jurors who had family members with felony convictions, including burglary and forgery.

The juror questionnaires did not require prospective jurors to report traffic violations. But police gave Evans information about the driving record of Carlos Ward, a 22 year-old Black man. And though he also struck Ward for sharing too many characteristics with Pitchford, Evans ultimately accepted at least 11 white potential jurors who shared at least one or more of the same characteristics, such as being unmarried or having young children. Six of those people ended up sitting on the jury. 

“He clearly did research on all the Black jurors,” Steiner said. 

Steiner objected on Batson grounds twice. Judge Loper’s decision to quickly move on with jury selection, without asking Steiner for rebuttal, would greatly affect Pitchford’s later appeals. “I was blindsided,” Steiner remembered. “I thought the judge was just committing error.” 

At trial, the jury heard testimony from two jailhouse informants. One said Pitchford admitted that he and Bullin robbed and killed Britt, and then later changed his story, saying he acted alone. The other testified that Pitchford told him both he and Bullin committed the crime, saying that Pitchford said “they” pointed a .22 at Britt and demanded he hand over money. “So they got the money out of the safe–well, out of the cash register. And they get the 38. And then he noticed that the 38 was loaded,” he testified. “Then they commenced on shooting him, I think, they said nine or eight times, eight or nine times with a 22 and a 38.”

Two other men, including Quincy Bullin, who had been identified by a witness as lurking near the store a week prior to the murder, had been charged as co-conspirators in the murder and testified against Pitchford at his trial. One said it was Pitchford’s idea to rob the store. Quincy testified that Pitchford had been involved in the previous robbery attempt. 

A forensic pathologist named Dr. Steven Hayne testified that Britt died from three wounds caused by small caliber bullets, and could have been shot from close-range. The wounds that covered Britt’s torso, thigh and arm were caused by rat shot and weren’t fatal, Hayne said. Hayne told the jury he conducted up to 1,600 autopsies a year, a figure well beyond the maximum of 250 per year recommended by the National Association of Medical Examiners. When pressed by Evans, Hayne testified that the gun containing rat shot could have been fired up to four times.

Investigators never found the murder weapon. At trial, prosecutors alleged that the black-handled, .38 revolver discovered in Pitchford’s car belonged to Britt, that Pitchford had gotten it at some point during the robbery, and, assuming it was loaded with lethal ammunition, shot Britt with the intention to kill him. A friend of Britt’s testified it was the same gun he’d given to Britt. Britt’s wife also testified that he kept two guns in the store, including a “pellet gun” that was missing from the store after the murder. That there was another .38 revolver discovered at the scene was barely mentioned by either side at trial, except when Evans showed Investigator Conley a photograph of the brown-handled firearm sitting on the shop counter. “It was at the crime scene when I got there,” Conley testified. 

Jurors also heard statements that Pitchford gave to investigators. At first, he denied being involved. By his fifth statement, Pitchford said Bullin walked into the store with a .22, shot Britt three times and asked Pitchford if he was going to “do anything.” Pitchford said he then fired the .38 into the floor.  

“It is like Terry is handcuffed to Mr. Britt’s murder because that gun you saw, was talked about so much, that was Mr. Britt’s gun,” said Assistant District Attorney Clyde Hill during closing arguments. “They didn’t know there was rat shot in that gun when they got it,” he added. “They were attempting to make sure that they left no witness.”

The jury’s deliberations lasted less than 45 minutes. Hogan, who was then a single mother to a toddler, had struggled to keep her composure throughout the trial. She left the courtroom before the verdict. “I didn’t want to hear it,” she recalled. “How the whole trial was going, I just knew.”

“He didn’t even have a chance,” she said.

The next day, after jurors heard testimony from Britt’s family, as well as Pitchford’s, they retreated again to deliberate whether to sentence Pitchford to life without parole or death. The jury chose death.

“I couldn’t look over at them,” Jackson remembered. She was heartbroken for Britt’s family, and also struggled to square the sentence her son received with what he told her during her visits to the jail: that he didn’t kill Britt. 

“I just wanted him to have a fair trial,” she said. “The justice system has got to be for everybody.”

A pathologist under fire, allegations of missing records 

Pitchford’s conviction would later be scrutinized by attorneys and investigators involved in his appeals. Pitchford’s hands and clothes weren’t tested for gunshot residue. Blood samples from Britt, Pitchford and Bullin, along with suspected blood samples taken from Pitchford’s shoes, shirt and pants, were either never tested for DNA, or the results were never disclosed to defense counsel. 

In his federal appeal, Pitchford’s current attorney, Joe Perkovich, wrote that it was impossible for pathologist Hayne to know that the .38 revolver filled with rat shot could have been fired up to four times. Hayne’s testimony about range of fire, and the bullet wounds, were also “outside of the scope of his expertise,” Perkovich wrote.

The work of Hayne, who at one point performed an estimated 80-90% of criminal autopsies in Mississippi, has become widely discredited: Nine prisoners have been exonerated after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence by Hayne and his partner Michael West. In November, a Louisiana man named Jimmie Chris Duncan was released on bail from death row after a judge overturned his conviction for the killing of his girlfriend’s daughter, which was based in part on Hayne and West’s shoddy bite mark analysis. Hayne died in 2020, but in 2023 West told The Garrison Project and The New Republic that he stands by their work. “Defense attorneys are allowed to lie, cheat, and steal, to do anything they can to get the death sentence overturned,” he said. 

At Pitchford’s trial, Hayne told jurors he was the “state pathologist for the Department of Public Safety Medical Examiner’s Office,” but no such position exists, and neither was he certified in forensic pathology by the American Board of Pathology, a credential required to serve as State Medical Examiner in Mississippi.

“The prosecution relied on Dr. Hayne’s false and misleading testimony to support its unsubstantiated theory that the gun recovered from Mr. Pitchford’s car was fired four times inside the store,” Perkovich wrote.

In 2019, after Pitchford challenged his detention in federal court, Judge Mills granted discovery in the case, a rare occurrence in habeas litigation. Perkovich, a founding member of Phillips Black, a nonprofit, public interest law firm that represents people on death row, and his team were able to depose key players in the case, including Evans, and requested case materials from the prosecutor’s and sheriff’s offices. The process, which continued through the COVID-19 pandemic, took more than three years, as attorneys dug through files stowed in an evidence vault and a storage closet, and filed motions demanding Evans release materials that had been ordered by the judge.

Through discovery, Perkovich learned that Evans failed to disclose key evidence and other impeachment materials to Pitchford’s defense counsel before trial, including an inconsistent statement made by a jailhouse informant who testified against Pitchford and evidence of a deal Evans made with a co-conspirator in exchange for his testimony. According to The Innocence Project, jailhouse informant testimony is one of the leading contributing factors of wrongful convictions; it played a role in nearly 17 percent of the 375 DNA-based exoneration cases from 1989-2020. 

Discovery also revealed the brown-handled .38 found at the scene of the murder was gone. Its ownership was never traced, nor did investigators ever determine what kind of ammunition it was loaded with. 

Gone, too, were recordings of statements made by Pitchford and records of statements made by Bullin, Pitchford’s co-defendant. Investigators interviewed him at least three times, according to court records, and he also submitted to a polygraph examination. The prosecutor’s office, however, didn’t turn over the polygraph results, nor any record of Bullin’s statements, such as transcripts or audio recordings. The only related record Pitchford’s legal team received was a short, handwritten note that memorialized a statement Bullin allegedly made to investigators. It suggested that one of the jailhouse informants who testified against Pitchford got rid of the stolen cash register, a significant piece of impeachment evidence that was not disclosed to Pitchford’s defense team before trial. 

What emerged through the examination of documents and the depositions, Perkovich said, “is a proliferation of very serious problems, that if defense counsel had the material at their disposal, very well would have created or caused a different result at trial. Frankly, had that been in play for trial, likely would have resulted in a resolution of this case prior to trial.”

Perkovich also obtained, for the first time, two juror lists made by Evans and Hill, the assistant district attorney. Both note the race and gender of each prospective juror and contain notes scrawled in the margins about jurors’ views of the death penalty and other characteristics, such as whether they had children or knew anyone involved in the case. Written next to nearly every Black prospective juror are notes describing the reason prosecutors didn’t want them to serve, such as having family members charged with crimes or being “mentally incompetent.” In several cases, prosecutors wrote “NO,” along with “NO D.P.” noting that the Black prospective juror was against the death penalty.

In an affidavit, Evans insisted that his office has provided all documents related to the Pitchford case. And in a deposition, Evans said he noted each juror’s race because the 5th Circuit Court District had asked attorneys to track juror demographics, in case of Baston-related appeals to the Mississippi Supreme Court. He said his notes also helped remind him of why he’d struck jurors. Because of Batson, he said, “I can strike a white juror just because I don’t like the way they blew their nose, but if it’s a black juror, I have to give race-neutral reasons.”

Perkovich questioned Evans on those reasons, including those he gave for his strike of Carlos Ward, who Evans struck for being too similar to Pitchford. Perkovich pointed out that white jurors shared some of the characteristics cited by Evans, such as having young children. But Evans argued that it was the totality of characteristics that mattered.

“If me and you were the same age, we were both unmarried, we both had two-year-old or three-year-old kids that are living in the same neighborhood, we’re going to have a lot in common,” Evans said, referring to Perkovich, who is white. “If I’m on trial, and you’re sitting over there, and you’re looking at me and say[ing], ‘That’s me over there because I’m in the exact same situation he’s in, I feel sorry for him,’ then that is going to be different than somebody that works [at] a factory or lives on the other side of town, goes to [a] different community club, has no connections at all than me and you would have.”

Evans said he tried to identify jurors who would be open to the prosecution’s case, and sought help from law enforcement to do so. “If I have an officer that tells me that we have had numerous stops on this person, we’ve had a lot of problems out of them, in addition to the fact that they will not give an opinion on how they would vote on the death penalty, plus them fitting in the same category as far as age, family, and things like that as the defendant, I’d be an idiot if I left them on a jury,” he said.

Evans, who is now retired, declined to comment for this story.

In a brief filed to the US Supreme Court, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch wrote that “as the Fifth Circuit held, the state courts here soundly applied Batson and properly refused to consider arguments that petitioner failed to present at trial.” In her brief, Fitch also concluded that Bullin shot Britt, killing him, while Pitchford shot him with a .38 loaded with rat shot and confessed to his role in the murder. 

Pitchford’s case arrives at the Supreme Court 

Though Justice Kavanaugh’s 2019 opinion in the Flowers case was lauded as a victory for Black defendants, the Supreme Court’s decision did little to reinforce Batson. Kavanaugh wrote twice that the Court’s decision broke “no new legal ground,” but only applied the law to the “extraordinary facts” of Flowers’ case. He also praised Batson for ending the widespread practice in which prosecutors would “routinely strike all black prospective jurors in cases involving black defendants,” a glowing assessment of the decision that’s out of touch with how most legal scholars view its legacy. 

Paul Butler, a former prosecutor and professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that the Flowers ruling not only ignored race in a case that had everything to do with it, its limited scope and the extraordinary facts of the case suggested that judges might invoke Flowers more often when rejecting Batson claims.

“The court understood that in a case like this, its legitimacy was on the line because the evidence was so compelling,” Butler, who authored a law review article in 2019 called “Mississippi Goddamn: Flowers v Mississippi’s Cheap Racial Justice,” said. “The court also understood that even in the ravages of the Mississippi criminal legal system, this case was extreme. Because it was extreme, it was unlikely to be repeated.” 

To the extent the court was concerned about setting a precedent that would have given Batson teeth, Butler added, “this was not a case where that would set that precedent.”

If the Court did intend to reinforce Batson, Flowers may have had the opposite effect in Mississippi. While some facts of the case are remarkable — no other known Mississippian has been tried six times by the same prosecutor — Evans’ strikes of prospective Black jurors were not. Nevertheless, said Carrington, of the Mississippi Innocence Project, the “extraordinary facts” of Flowers became a new benchmark that defendants appealing their case in Mississippi now have to meet in order to prove racial bias. 

“There are things that happen in courtrooms every day that are motivated by race,” Carrington said. “And they’re not part of the calculus that the court is willing to consider when it deals with Batson problems.”

A critical test of how the Mississippi Supreme Court would rule on Batson in the wake of Flowers occurred in 2022, when it ruled on the appeal of Tony Terrell Clark, a Black man sentenced to death by a jury composed of 11 white people and one Black juror. Steiner, who also represented Clark on appeal, used Flowers to show how both trial and appeals courts should conduct a full inquiry into the ‘totality of the circumstances’ of the case, and prosecutor, when evaluating Batson claims. The Mississippi Supreme Court disagreed. 

“The case before us is not Flowers,” Justice Dawn Beam wrote for the majority. “And we reiterate that consistent with Pitchford, and absent exceptional circumstances, we will not consider, on direct appeal, rebuttal evidence and arguments that were not presented to the trial court.” 

Then, in 2023, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s emphasis in Flowers on its role in guarding “against any backsliding” on Batson, it declined to hear Clark’s case, prompting a withering dissent from Justice Sotomayor, who wrote that the Court’s punt sent a dangerous signal to Mississippi. “Today, this Court tells the Mississippi Supreme Court that it has called our bluff, and that this Court is unwilling to do what is necessary to defend its own precedent,” she wrote. “The result is that Flowers will be toothless in the very State where it appears to be still so needed.”

When the Supreme Court in December agreed to hear Pitchford’s case, it said it would consider only a narrow question: whether the Mississippi Supreme Court’s ruling that Pitchford had waived his right to rebut Evans’ race-neutral reasons for striking Black prospective jurors was unreasonable. 

Arguments will be heard March 31, and a decision could be issued sometime in the summer. Pitchford’s habeas claim is still pending in federal court, so if the Supreme Court denies Pitchford’s Batson claim, it’s not his last chance to avoid execution, according to Perkovich. In early February, several advocacy and civil rights groups filed amicus briefs in support of Pitchford’s case, including the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, the ACLU, and the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, who are represented by Carrington. Lee, Tidwell and Ward, three of the struck Black jurors, argued in their own brief that Evans had violated their constitutional right to serve on a jury free from racial discrimination. On Friday, a group of state attorneys general, including Louisiana’s Liz Murrill, filed a brief supporting the state, arguing, in part, that trial judges are entrusted with identifying racial discrimination and Batson claims should be resolved at trial. 

Throughout his time in prison, Pitchford and his son, De’Terrius Pitchford, have stayed close: Pitchford mails him gifts and, through phone calls and letters, gives him advice. “Even though he was incarcerated he still provided for me, to make sure he was still in my life,” De’Terrius, who is now 21, said.

As a child, he’d visited his father at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, where the state’s male death row inmates are housed. But he didn’t know his father was among them. Both Pitchford, and Hogan, his mother, wanted to protect him. “I just could never find a way to explain it to him,” Hogan said. “I used to tell Terry to tell him, but he was like, he didn’t want to hurt him. He didn’t know how to tell him.” 

It wasn’t until a lull during a high school class, when De’Terrius Googled his dad’s name, that he learned the truth. “It was heartbreaking,” he said. 

Today, De’Terrius, who has followed his father’s case ever since, hopes he’ll have a chance to be with his father on the outside. “I’m looking forward to that moment,” he said.

Hannah McAlilly is an award-winning, independent investigative journalist and producer with a focus on civil rights, the criminal legal system, addiction and public health. She worked for 13 years as a reporter and producer with the Investigative Unit at NBC News.

Hence then, the article about a mississippi death penalty jury was seated with one black juror was published today ( Thursday 12/03/2026 - 01:02 PM ) and is available on Mississippi Today ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.

Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( A Mississippi death penalty jury was seated. With one Black juror. )

Also on site :

• Юридическая фирма Kasowitz LLP опубликовала актуализированный отчет, посвященный анализу нарушений фундаментальных процессуальных норм как основания для дальнейшего содержания под стражей и судебного преследования мэра Тираны (Албания) Эрио
• Asia rolls out four-day weeks and work-from-home as emergency measures to solve a fuel crisis caused by Iran war
• Massive fires on two oil tankers after attack in Iraqi waters