Phillips Black wins Supreme Court habeas case

On May 28, 2026, the Supreme Court handed down an historic habeas corpus decision, ruling in favor of Phillips Black client Mr. Terry Pitchford while reversing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In Pitchford v. Cain, 608 U.S. 391, 146 S. Ct. 1345, Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion for the Court concluded that the Fifth Circuit had failed to recognize that the Mississippi Supreme Court’s 2010 opinion affirming Mr. Pitchford’s 2006 conviction and death sentence for participation in a botched robbery in which his co-defendant killed the shopkeeper had both unreasonably determined the facts and misapplied the Equal Protection Clause.

Pitchford v. Cain, litigated by senior attorney Joe Welling and Joe Perkovich, principal attorney, who argued the case on March 31, 2026, is just the second time the Supreme Court has ever held a petitioner established that a state supreme court had both so severely violated the law and misconstrued the facts of a trial record as to have exceeded the extreme restrictions on habeas corpus relief under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996—specifically, surpassing both Section 2254(d)(1), and (d)(2) of Title 28 of the U.S. Code. Further, Pitchford is the first time in nearly nine years that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a habeas corpus petitioner under either (d)(1) or (d)(2) of § 2254. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court delivered its opinion to the Fifth Circuit, returning the case to that court, where the team continues to litigate the case.

Writing for the Court, Justice Kavanaugh applied longstanding authorities under the Equal Protection Clause to conclude that the trial court, and then the Mississippi Supreme Court, failed to uphold the process for testing jury strike challenges. In Mr. Pitchford’s 2006 trial in Grenada, Mississippi, the defense challenged the prosecution’s striking of four Black prospective jurors for violation of the forty-year-old precedent of Batson v. Kentucky. Batson requires trial courts to determine whether a party has intentionally discriminated in exercising an elective strike of a potential juror. At Mr. Pitchford’s trial, the trial court first failed to permit defense counsel to rebut the reasons the prosecutor gave to justify his use of each of the four challenged peremptory strikes and then failed to make judicial determinations on each of these challenges, as Batson dictates. The resulting jury from this defective process rendered a guilty verdict and sentenced Mr. Pitchford to death for a botched robbery at the age of 18, wherein his codefendant–according to the State of Mississippi’s theory of the case–fatally shot the storekeeper. The prosecutor later struck a plea bargain with the co-defendant for merely a sentence of years, despite having committed a separate murder while jailed for this case.