The US Supreme Court ruled 5–4 on Thursday in favour of Terry Pitchford, a Black death row inmate from Mississippi, finding that racial bias tainted the jury that convicted him of capital murder. Pitchford, now 40, was sentenced to death for his role in the robbery of a grocery store near Grenada, Mississippi, in which the store owner was fatally shot; his case drew scrutiny partly because the same now-retired prosecutor, Doug Evans, and the same trial judge were involved in the case of Curtis Flowers, whose conviction the Supreme Court overturned in 2019 after finding a pattern of deliberately excluding Black jurors. The ruling, which comes after more than two decades of legal proceedings, reverses a federal appeals court decision and marks a significant application of the Court's 1986 Batson v. Kentucky precedent prohibiting race-based exclusion of jurors.