OurTupelo

Max Baria, a 17-year-old high school senior from Bay St. Louis, is a good-looking, soft-spoken, highly intelligent young man, who emerged this basketball season as one of the best high school players in Mississippi.

Baria, who stands a slender 6 feet, 8 inches tall, last Saturday helped St. Stanislaus to the State Class 3A Championship. This Saturday, he will play for the Mississippi team in the annual Mississippi-Alabama All-Star Game (2 p.m.) at A.E. Wood Coliseum on the campus of Mississippi College. His story – actually his and his family’s story – is one worthy of telling and perhaps re-telling.

Where to begin?

We probably should begin nearly three years before Max was born. That was in August of 2005 when Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, demolishing the dream home of David and Marcie Baria and their three children on Beach Road in Waveland. Something far, far worse happened a month later. Darden Baria, David and Marcie’s oldest child and only son, became mysteriously ill and died at the age of 10. The Barias later learned that Darden died of rabies, probably the result of a bite from a rabid bat on a camping trip.

Readers should know the Barias were – and remain – good friends of this writer. In all my life, I have never witnessed such grief as the Baria family endured. They were, in a word, broken.

Says David, a lawyer and former state senator and representative, “You never, ever get over something like that. You just don’t. You just have to find better ways to cope.”

Says Marcie Baria, a retired lawyer, “I knew almost immediately, and I don’t know how I knew – but I knew there was going to be another child in our lives.”

They tried. First, David underwent a vasectomy reversal. That didn’t work. They tried in vitro fertilization. That didn’t take. They decided on adoption and listed the preference of a male baby, and the wait began.

“We were on the list nine months and heard nothing, not a thing,” Marcie says. “Finally, I called to ask what was going on. The answer we got was that it was really difficult to find a white baby boy.”

To which Marcie responded, “Who said anything about the baby being white?”

Not more than a week later, the Barias received a call from the adoption agency that a possible baby had been found. A young unwed mother was considering putting her as yet unborn baby up for adoption. The birth mother was white, the father was Black.

That baby was Max, who was born May 30, 2008, 21 inches long and 7 pounds, 8 ounces, with gorgeous brown eyes that seemed as big as saucers.

“The first time I held him and he opened those eyes, I was just blown away,” Marcie now says. “He was just perfect.”

And now, nearly 18 years later, she puts it this way: “He saved my life.”

“When we first started talking about having another child, David told me, ‘Before we have another child, we need to get ourselves emotionally right,’” Marcie says. “I told him that he had it backwards, that I wouldn’t be right until I had another child.”

It is no understatement to say that since birth Max has been smothered in love, from Marcie and David and his older sisters Merritt, 29, and Bess, 27. 

“The girls were so excited when Max came home,” Marcie says. “We all were. I think, after what we had been through, we were all determined that we weren’t going to take a single second of Max’s life for granted.”

Says David, “All his life, Max has been enveloped in a world of people, both Black and white, who have just loved and supported him.” 

It helps that Max makes friends easily and has had many of the same close friends since kindergarten at Coast Episcopal School. Says David, “There’s about seven or eight of them and they are like brothers.”

David Baria says his adopted son was still a toddler when it first dawned on Max that his skin was different than that of those he lived with. “You could see it,” David says. “Max would look down at his arm and then put it next to mine and compare. I told him, ‘Son, it’s just skin. We’re all the same.’”

The Baria family does get some strange and questioning looks when out in public.

“It’s not like it was back the ’60s, nothing blatant,” David says. “You see the second glances, kind of like ‘what’s going on here’ looks. There’s not been any overt racism. Well, there was only one time when Max was at a sailing camp. There were four kids in a boat and the other three were white. One of the kids called Max the n-word. Max never said anything to us about it, and he wouldn’t. But we heard about it from the man who ran the camp, who apologized and told us that one of Max’s friends slugged the kid in the nose, and that was that.”

For his part, Max Baria says he doesn’t see anything unusual about his life or his upbringing. What might seem strange or unusual to others is just the way it has always been for Max. Marcie and David are simply Mom and Dad. Merritt and Bess are his loving older sisters. He knows he has an older brother, Darden, who died before he was born. The rest of the family has told him all about Darden.

Learning has come easily for Max, who has a 3.6 grade point average (on a 4.0 scale) in rigorous advanced placement classes and a 29 score on the ACT. 

He played all the sports until the ninth grade when he decided to concentrate on basketball. He once won an MVP award at Mike Bianco’s Ole Miss baseball camp. He also excelled in youth soccer, as did Darden.

He says he loves basketball most because “it’s such a team sport” and because “when you really work at it, you can see yourself getting better.”

Daniel Grieves, who has been Max’s coach since the eighth grade, says Max’s best basketball is ahead of him. “He’s going to get bigger and a whole lot stronger. He’s competitive and he’s so intelligent. Some people would say he’s quiet and reserved, but what I love most about him is that he stays on such an even keel. He never gets rattled, no matter the situation.”

Doctors have told the Barias that X-rays of Max’s growth plates indicate he could add another two or three inches in height. When ask how often he shaves, Max answers, “Once a week, maybe.”

In the days before the transfer portal, a player with Max’s height and skill level likely would receive several Division I college basketball scholarship offers, probably red-shirt his first year and be given time to develop as a player. Now, with the portal, coaches are looking for more seasoned and physically developed players who can help right away

Max, whose goal is to eventually play D-1 basketball, was recruited by several small colleges and junior colleges and chose the junior college route at Jones in Ellisville, where Newton Mealer has consistently put together winning teams. Mealer believes young Baria has barely touched the surface of what he can become as a basketball player, provided, that is, he dedicates himself to the weight room and continuing to develop his skills.

“Great kid, great family,” Mealer says. “We can’t wait to get him in our program.”

Meanwhile, David and Marcie Baria are preparing for life in an empty nest and most likely a lot of 90-mile trips to Ellisville.

Not long ago, Marcie received a call from Darden’s kindergarten teacher who has stayed in touch through the years. The teacher said she had been going through some old things in storage and found a record she said was Darden’s favorite. Each day, when the children came in from recess, she would let one choose his or her favorite song to play. Darden’s fave was a song called “Happy Adoption Day.”

Marcie never knew about the song back then but tears well in her eyes when she talks about it today.

“It’s almost like Darden is sending a message to his brother Max,” she says.

A couple stanzas of the lyrics will tell you why:

“There are those who think families happen by chance

A mystery their whole life through

But we had a voice and we had a choice

We were working and waiting for you

No matter the name and no matter the age

No matter how you came to be

No matter the skin, we are all of us kin

We are all of us one family.”

Officials tasked with selecting and naming the next Jackson State University president plan to choose three top candidates next week, March 19-20, and invite them to the campus for a second round of interviews in mid-April. 

On Thursday, members of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning’s Board of Trustees, the Jackson State search advisory constituency and search firm consultants went into closed session to discuss semifinalists for first-round interviews. March 3 was the deadline to apply for the university’s top role. 

Officials would not say how many applications they received for the role. 

IHL assembled a search advisory group to assist with the president search to increase transparency, but members of that group said they cannot publicly discuss potential candidates because an IHL board policy prohibits it.

Patrease Edwards, president of the Jackson State University National Alumni Association and a member of the advisory group, said members signed a confidentiality agreement and cannot discuss details of the meeting. Gee Ogletree, president of the IHL board and member of the search committee, said he could not comment on the meeting. 

Sen. Sollie Norwood, a Democrat from Jackson and a JSU alumnus, said he believes the search process has been transparent and understands why the board would want to keep names of candidates confidential. He said he is prepared to embrace the best candidate the group puts forward. 

Unstable leadership at Jackson State has been a barrier for many projects state legislators want to enact for the university, Norwood said. “It has been kind of difficult to move forward.”

Rep. Zakiya Summers, a Democrat from Jackson and a JSU alumna, said she hopes the next president comes into their role with a clear vision to move the university forward. This vision should include a “plan to prioritize students’ issues related to housing,” or “getting a new stadium,” she said. 

“They need to recognize the significance of working alongside folks that represent JSU, like lawmakers and alumni, because we’re the ones that carry the name and legacy,” Summers said.

The Jackson State presidency has been vacant since May, when Marcus Thompson resigned without explanation less than two years into his tenure. He was the university’s third president in five years. Denise Jones Gregory, former provost and vice president of academic affairs, is serving as the interim president. 

In December, IHL trustees voted unanimously to waive the board’s policy that would prevent a university interim president from applying for the permanent position at the institution they lead. Jones Gregory is eligible to apply for the president role. Mississippi Today reached out to Jones Gregory to ask if she had applied for the role, but she did not immediately respond. 

The December vote reflects repeated criticism the IHL board received from alumni and stakeholders last summer, which questioned the fairness of the search process and lack of transparency. 

A bill cleared the Legislature on Wednesday that would temporarily ease state approval requirements for rural hospitals, allowing them to add new services or make costly upgrades as lawmakers aim to help struggling facilities provide needed care and boost revenue.

The bill establishes a pilot program that will benefit about 55 rural hospitals across the state until June 2027. The legislation would loosen the state’s certificate of need laws, which require providers who want to open new services or make costly expansions to first prove they are needed in their area to curb potentially wasteful spending. Hospitals require approval for changes over $20 million for nonclinical improvements, $10 million for clinical improvements and $3 million for major medical equipment. 

Hospitals in small communities will be granted approval to open one new facility within five miles of their main campuses or make an improvement above the threshold, and those located in the Mississippi Delta will be allowed two exemptions. The facilities will also be allowed to open geriatric psychiatric units without seeking approval first. 

The House and Senate traded bills altering certificate of need requirements for rural hospitals this session, nearing consensus as the session went on. House Bill 1622 will go to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’ desk in the coming days. If the governor signs the bill or allows it to become law without his signature, it will go into effect immediately. 

Senate Public Health and Welfare Chairman Hob Bryan, a Democrat from Amory, said March 5 that, while he has been slow to support changes to the state’s certificate of need law, he believes there is merit in implementing a pilot program to see if loosening restrictions could help rural hospitals. 

“I know for sure there are going to be unintended consequences,” Bryan said. “I don’t know what they are … but I think the time has come, as I phrased it from time to time, to do something in this general area.” 

The author of the legislation, House Public Health and Human Services Chairman Sam Creekmore, a Republican from New Albany, previously told Mississippi Today he drafted the legislation to allow rural hospitals more flexibility to open services without going through the certificate of need process, “hopefully making them more profitable, and providing better health care services at the same time.”

Certificate of need laws aim to lower costs and improve the quality and accessibility of health care by reducing duplication of services, but stakeholders are divided on whether or not it accomplishes its goals.

Critics argue the law stifles competition and fails to decrease costs. Advocates say it ensures that communities have access to a range of health services, not only those that are profitable. In Mississippi, where more than half of rural hospitals are at risk of closure, some people argue the law harms rural hospitals by restricting the services they are allowed to offer.

The bill also aims to speed up the certificate of need process by implementing a ‘loser pay’ provision. This language would require any party appealing the state’s approval for a new facility or improvement to pay the applicant’s legal fees if the ruling is not overturned. 

Certificate of need law has long been criticized as cumbersome and time-consuming, often slowing the opening of new health care services when competing health providers appeal the state’s issuance of a certificate. 

The legislation passed Wednesday also removes Humphreys and Issaquena counties from certificate of need requirements entirely and grants the state health officer the authority to issue licenses to eight dialysis facilities across the state.  

The legislation is the second change lawmakers have proposed to the state’s certificate of need law this session. Reeves signed a bill Feb. 4 that will make it easier for health facilities to make costly improvements and limit where the University of Mississippi Medical Center can open new locations without state approval. 

Another similar measure that makes it easier for rural hospitals to open facilities was passed by the House March 10 and has been returned to the Senate for consideration. 

A Hinds County Chancery judge on Wednesday ordered the Mississippi Division of Medicaid to temporarily stop collecting money owed by Greenwood Leflore Hospital after the hospital said resuming the recoupments would likely force the Delta hospital to close. 

The public hospital and Mississippi Medicaid have been locked in a dispute since last summer about how quickly the hospital must repay the debt, which stems from a state program designed to help struggling hospitals. Under the order from Judge J. Dewayne Thomas, the state must pause the recoupments while the hospital’s case proceeds in court, as long as the hospital posts a $50,000 cash bond within 30 days.

The program, designed to supplement low Medicaid reimbursements, initially provided a financial boost to Greenwood Leflore Hospital, which has struggled for years to stay open. But the payments were later recalculated using updated patient volume data as a part of a routine process that found the amount of funding was too high. That discrepancy occurred because state officials did not account for declining patient volumes after the hospital closed its labor and delivery and intensive care units in 2022.

In a Thursday email to Mississippi Today, Gary Marchand, the hospital’s former interim CEO who now serves as a consultant for the Greenwood Leflore Hospital’s board, said the hospital appreciates the court’s understanding of “the financial crises” created by the repayments.

The Division of Medicaid did not respond to a request for comment.

If the Division of Medicaid were to resume the recoupments — previously scheduled to begin again in March — it would have dire consequences for the hospital, Marchand said in a March 6 court filing. 

“GLH’s financial viability will be harmed to the extent that it will be unable to meet its financial obligations, which will likely lead to closure absent extraordinary action,” Marchand wrote.

The Division of Medicaid notified the hospital in June of 2025 it would recoup $5.5 million. Hospital leaders warned the agency in September that the proposed repayment schedule of $900,000 a quarter — with about $2 million already recovered that summer — would severely strain the long-struggling hospital. 

In December, both parties agreed to pause the repayments until March to give the hospital time to secure a bond. But Marchand wrote March 6 that the hospital had in good faith exhausted all reasonable efforts to obtain a bond, including working with 10 surety companies through two agents and negotiating directly with the Division of Medicaid. Surety companies are specialized financial institutions that issue bonds to guarantee that a business will fulfill contractual obligations to another party.

Marchand said the hospital is exploring options to sell, lease or transfer the facility to a larger health care system. If the recoupments resume, “the likelihood of successfully completing these negotiations will be irreparably harmed,” he said, pointing to the importance of staff remaining at the facility and the continued maintenance of property and equipment. 

Mississippi Today previously reported that Greenwood Leflore Hospital and its owners signed a letter of intent in February to discuss a possible transaction in which the hospital would contribute all land, facilities, assets and operations to the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the state’s only academic medical center, or its affiliate. The proposed donation would include clinics, ancillary facilities and physician practices, and it would give UMMC full authority and control over the hospital.

The hospital needs four to six months to complete negotiations pertaining to the lease, sale or transfer of the hospital, and for the repayments to be paused during that time, Marchand said.

In recent weeks, state lawmakers have also sought to pave the way for a possible transfer of the hospital. 

State lawmakers hurried Senate Bill 3230 through the legislative process to allow the public hospital to file for bankruptcy, passing it out of both chambers March 6 and sending it to the governor’s desk. This step will allow another entity to take over, Sen. Rita Parks, a Republican from Corinth and chair of the Local and Private Committee, told fellow lawmakers.

“We do have another hospital that is waiting at the door to come in,” Parks said. 

Senate lawmakers failed to act on a bill that called for more oversight of prison deaths.

On Wednesday, the last day for action on bills originating from the other chamber, House Bill 1739 did not come up for a vote.

The legislation was inspired by an investigation by Missisisppi Today, The Marshall-Project Jackson, the Clarion Ledger, the Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link.

Rep. Becky Currie, a Brookhaven Republican who filed the prison death oversight legislation and chairs the House Corrections Committee, has told lawmakers that people continue to die in prison and their cause of death remains unknown, regardless if it was by homicide, accidental drug overdose, suicide or lack of access to health care. 

“There is no way of making a plan to stop increases in deaths if we do not know or keep up with what is going on,” she said before the bill died on the calendar. 

Currie said internal investigations into prison deaths don’t always take place or are incomplete, so the bill would have provided desperately needed data. 

Senate Corrections Chairman Juan Barnett had said he planned to review the prison death task force legislation before bringing it up for a vote in his committee, saying prison deaths are something that needs to be looked into more. 

“More oversight, more transparency for the public so they can feel more comfortable and know that if something happens, somebody will be on top of it to make sure that we don’t have any bad actors,” he said. 

The Heidelberg Democrat has been out of the Capitol recovering from an illness, leaving Vice Chairwoman Lydia Chassaniol, a Winona Republican, in charge. She said Barnett only requested two bills be passed in committee: HB 1739 and HB 1444, which would give protective equipment to prisoners working with harmful chemicals, including those that can cause cancer. HB 1444 advanced Wednesday. 

But Chassaniol passed on bringing up the prison deaths oversight bill before the full Senate when it came up on the calendar. 

The bill would have directed and empowered the existing Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force to look into “unexpected” deaths, which would have included those not related to a previously diagnosed or serious terminal illness.

Under Currie’s bill, the task force would have been required to release a public report describing its findings and recommendations to try to prevent future deaths.

Currie proposed prison death oversight in response to an investigation by the news outlets. Prison understaffing and gang violence likely led to the killings of nearly 50 people since 2015, the news team found. Eight resulted in criminal convictions. At least 20 deaths remain undetermined. 

Family members of people killed in prison said they received little information from prison officials, and instead had more luck learning from a whisper network of incarcerated people, insiders, advocates, and, in some cases, from journalists. 

Weeks after the news investigation, prison Commissioner Burl Cain told a legislative budget committee and Mississippi Today that the department would review unprosecuted homicides and deaths ruled as undetermined. 

But five months later, there have been no new indictments or convictions in open homicide cases.

Currie’s bill would have also added members to the task force, including the chairs of the House and Senate Corrections committees, the Accountability, Efficiency and Transparency committees and the public safety commissioner or a designee. 

Currently, much of the task force representation is from Department of Corrections staff members, leading to a situation where “MDOC is reviewing themselves,” Currie said.

Reporters Jerry Mitchell and Michael Goldberg contributed to this report. 

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.

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 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. 

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 “age
is very much in line with the age of the defendant,” and
the prosecutor was “concerned that he may identify with
him 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.

After the House and Senate killed each other’s teacher pay raise bills last week, they’ve revived them by amending other bills, with the Senate upping the ante on Wednesday.

The Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a $6,000 teacher pay raise with an extra $3,000 for special education teachers.

The House has proposed a $5,000 raise, with an extra $3,000 for special education teachers.

The Senate had initially passed only a $2,000 teacher raise before the chambers killed each other’s bills.

But the new Senate plan would spread its proposed $6,000 a year raise over three years, at $2,000 a year, plus $1,000 a year more for special ed teachers.

The Senate vote comes after the House revived its own teacher pay raise on Friday by amending a Senate bill. 

“Today is a good day for teachers, teacher assistants, professors and special education teachers,” Senate Education Committee Chairman Dennis DeBar, a Republican from Leakesville, said after Wednesday’s vote. “This is a big step moving forward.”

Under the Senate proposal, university and community college professors and K-12 teacher assistants would also get a $2,000 a year raise. 

The bill would over three years bring starting Mississippi teacher pay to $47,500. It would cost taxpayers $109.5 million extra a year, for a total of $328.5 million a year once fully implemented, according to legislative budget analysts.

One of the major differences from the House proposal is that the Senate bill would keep the pay raise money outside of the state’s per-student student funding formula during the first year to ensure that the money is goes to raises. When money passes through the formula, DeBar said, districts are not required to spend it on teacher raises because they receive it as a lump sum. 

“We put a lot of thought into this,” DeBar said on the floor. “We would like to do more … but we’re being cautious and prudent as we do over here in the Senate.” 

If either proposal becomes law, it would be the first raise for teachers in Mississippi since 2022, when they got a $5,000 a year increase. At the time, it brought Mississippi’s pay above other Southern states, but as neighboring states have passed raises, Mississippi has again fallen behind. 

Mississippi educators, now the lowest paid in the country on average, say it’s gotten harder to make ends meet in the years since.

“At the end of these three years, it’s gonna be a wildly increased raise for the teachers,” DeBar said. “I know five to 10 years from now, we’re gonna be back because our competing states are going to raise their pay to keep up with us, but I think this is a good start.”

The relationship between the Republican-led House and Senate has soured this session over education issues. Speaker Jason White has taken shots at Senate leadership, including Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, for failing to take up the House’s school choice proposals, while the Senate has returned barbs.

The squabbling reached a head last week when each chamber killed the other’s initial pay raise proposals. 

But Senate leaders made good Wednesday on an earlier promise to raise their teacher raise proposal by the end of the session. DeBar successfully offered an amendment to a House bill on Wednesday, the deadline for such action coming late in the 2026 legislative session. 

DeBar said the Senate would not consider the House’s latest pay raise proposal, which is hundreds of pages long and covers a range of topics including adjustments to the state employees’ retirement system, combatting chronic absenteeism in schools and capping superintendents’ pay. Senators have taken issue with the House’s omnibus bill strategy this session of including dozens of policy issues in one piece of legislation. 

Advocates have expressed concerns that the House proposal brings forward extraneous parts of state law, which could pave the way for changes well beyond teacher pay. In a statement after the Senate vote, Hosemann said a teacher pay raise “must not be held hostage by multiple other political issues.”

However, House leaders have said they are being thorough with their legislation, and not trying to tie school choice or other issues to a teacher raise.

“We wanted to narrow it down to one issue dealing with teachers, and that’s what we did,” DeBar said. “I tried to block out all the other noise … I want to focus on teachers because they’re the ones that deserve it. They’re the ones that brought us up to where we are.”

Mississippi has received national recognition over the past decade for public school academic gains.

Now, each chamber could approve the other’s proposal, ask for final negotiations on a compromise, or kill the bills.

“No one wants to see the sausage being made because that’s what we do — we debate,” DeBar said. “But in the end, I think we always come together and compromise.”

Crime victims and family members gathered Wednesday at the state Capitol for what organizers said would be the first Survivors Speak Mississippi event. They called on lawmakers to reform the state’s victim compensation program and fund a trauma recovery center in Jackson. Survivors from across the state held a rally and vigil to honor victims of gun violence, domestic violence, sexual assault and other crimes. 

Carleen Hicks has cared for her grandchildren, now 17 and 14, for nearly a decade after her daughter was shot, became partially paralyzed and developed a drug habit.

“To keep my grandbabies safe, I just had to take on that role,” Hicks said. 

Hicks, who is 54 and a custodian at Chapel of the Cross Church in Madison, said she’s happily taken on that responsibility, but it can be hard to make ends meet. She previously relied on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, but the paperwork was confusing and time-consuming. In 2024, she felt she could no longer justify missing work to go to hours-long recertification appointments for the benefits, and fell off the program. As a result, she said, her family eats less fresh produce and meat.

Experts say that versions of Hicks’ story will become more common after newly-expanded federal work requirements took effect in November. Previously, adults over 54 and people who care for children under the age of 18 were exempt. Under the new rules, adults between the age of 55 and 64 and caretakers of children older than 13 must now work 80 hours a month to keep their food benefits. An already-burdened system will become more strained, according to state and national experts who spoke to Mississippi Today. 

Work requirements and the red tape that comes with them could disproportionately hurt older caregivers and their families. That’s because older adults are more likely to have fixed incomes, limited access to computers, age-related health problems and care for older children who do not qualify them for the exemption. In Mississippi, 3.3% of children live in grandparent-caregiver households – more than double the national average and one of the highest rates in the country. 

Nationwide, family members who step into parental roles save taxpayers and states $10.5 billion by keeping children out of the foster care system. But these families face higher rates of poverty. 

The new age cutoff for children of exempted caretakers is arbitrary and harmful, said food access advocate Gina Plata-Nino, since the responsibility of caring for a child does not change at age 14. 

“The expanded requirements suggest parents’ responsibilities have shifted overnight even though they are still caring for dependents,” said Plata-Nino, director of SNAP at the Food Research and Action Center, a national nonprofit working to end poverty-related hunger.

Hicks recalled spending hours at the Hinds County Department of Human Services for a recertification appointment in 2024 to determine if she still qualified for benefits, only to have a caseworker ask for additional documents days later. Another time, she got a letter in the mail stating she missed a phone appointment. But Hicks said she never received a phone call – an experience shared by two other women who spoke to Mississippi Today. 

“It’s to deter you,” Hicks said. 

Regulations that Congress passed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and that President Donald Trump signed into law in July further complicate that process. Here’s how federal law changed SNAP work requirements in November:

• Increased the work requirement age from 55- to 64-years-old;
• Decreased the child age exemption from 18- to 14-years-old;
• Removed exemptions for unhoused people, veterans and young adults under age 24 who aged out of the foster care system.

Exemptions still exist for adults who are pregnant, caring for a child under the age of 14, have a mental or physical disability or are over the age of 64. Those who don’t meet the exemptions will have to adhere to the work requirements and undergo recertification every six months, or they will lose benefits after three months. The recertification process includes logging hours that a person worked or volunteered each month, undergoing an interview and showing documents, such as paystubs, utility bills and identification.

Hicks said caring for her grandchildren is fulfilling, but she never imagined she would be raising teenagers at her age. It’s exhausting, she said. Aside from the strain of raising children, older adults face greater discrimination in the job market and are more prone to chronic health conditions that can make it hard to work consistent, full-time hours outside of the house. 

It’s hard for the children, too, said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Tax and Income Supports Division at the Urban Institute. Children living in a grandparent-led household have already suffered disruptions in life, Waxman said. Whether it’s a parent dying, going to prison or suffering from mental health or addiction, there is some reason the child cannot live with their birth parents. 

“Those are the kinds of things that get lost,” Waxman said. “They’re nuances, but they’re not unimportant nuances.”

In addition to expanding who is required to work to access food assistance under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, about $140 million in SNAP costs previously covered by the federal government will shift to Mississippi in the next two years.

In the long-term, experts told Mississippi Today more people will lose access to SNAP for several reasons:

• Increased paperwork will inadvertently kick off eligible people;
• Fewer people will be eligible under new federally-mandated work requirements;
• Some states may further cut eligibility to afford the new costs. 

Considering how much money caregivers like herself save the state, Hicks said she believes the government should make it easier for grandparent-led families to access food. Most of all, Hicks thinks vulnerable adolescents who have already lost their parents shouldn’t be used as political bargaining chips. 

“It should be mandatory that the kids get food stamps if you’re in a certain income bracket,” Hicks said. “Of course, Granny is going to eat off the food – but don’t deprive the children because of that.”

Welcome to Mississippi Explained, our weekly news quiz to test your knowledge of this week’s news. 🧠

Context: The Senate Energy Committee last week advanced a bill that would place Jackson’s water and sewer systems under a separate utility authority. The bill would remove the city’s majority control of the authority’s board.

Previously: In February, the House passed a HB1677 that would create the “Metro Jackson Authority” and be led by a nine-member board that would include Jackson’s mayor, two members appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the Jackson City Council and the president or designee of the Greater Jackson Chamber of Commerce. The governor and lieutenant governor would also appoint members who live or work in the service area.

What’s the catch? The Senate’s version of the bill would allow the mayors of Ridgeland and Byram to make direct appointments and replace the Chamber of Commerce appointee with another named by the governor. Notably, the Senate version gives Jackson city officials direct power over only three board seats, down from five in the House version.

 The bill also contains a reverse repealer.

Quiz question: What is the main purpose of a reverse repealer?

Email your answer to newsletter@mississippitoday.org with your first name and last initial, and we’ll shout you out in the next quiz post.

Last week’s answer: Committee chair

Congratulations to last week’s winners: Connie C., Mac D., and Rita H.

READ MORE: Senators tweak Jackson water bill, city loses majority of board power

Think you know the news? Take more quizzes like this one: sign up for The Today, our daily newsletter, and never miss a chance to test your knowledge.