March 31, 2026 — SCOTUS AM (March Madness Day 7)

Terry Pitchford was convicted in 2006 for his role in the death of a shopkeeper during a robbery. Sentenced to death. At trial, prosecutor Doug Evans used peremptory challenges to remove four Black jurors. Pitchford's attorney requested a Batson hearing. Evans offered race-neutral explanations; the judge accepted them. On appeal, the Mississippi Supreme Court added a new problem: it said Pitchford's lawyers had failed to adequately object at trial, so they'd waived their Batson rights. Federal district court disagreed and found Mississippi had erred. Fifth Circuit reversed: under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), a federal court can't just say a state court was wrong — the state court has to have been "objectively unreasonable," a much higher bar. The Doug Evans connection mattered. He was the same prosecutor the Supreme Court had already reversed twice in the Curtis Flowers case — a man tried six times, convicted by all-white juries each time, imprisoned for 22 years before release. Two of those convictions were overturned by SCOTUS specifically because of Evans's pattern with peremptory challenges. Whether that history would surface in argument was unclear, but it had been heavily covered in the press that week. Bryan's background on jury selection: peremptory challenges let lawyers cut jurors without explanation — "get-out-of-jail-free cards." But in Batson v. Kentucky, the Court held that if a defendant can show a prima facie case of racial exclusion, the prosecutor must provide race-neutral justifications. The structural tension: peremptory challenges are built to not require explanations, but Batson requires explanations when race is the apparent pattern.