Justice Sotomayor torches 'wrong' conservative court over racial bias: 'Double standard'

A Black man sits on death row in Mississippi, convicted by a jury of 11 white people and one Black juror — and now a Supreme Court justice says the far-right state court that keeps rejecting his appeals is applying a standard that is "almost certainly wrong."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor used a Supreme Court order Monday to rebuke the Mississippi Supreme Court over its handling of racial bias claims in the case of Tony Terrell Clark, a death row inmate whose lawyers say prosecutors systematically weeded out Black jurors at his trial.

Clark was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for the 2014 robbery and killing of 13-year-old Muhammed Saeed at a convenience store in Canton, Mississippi.

Prosecutors struck Black prospective jurors at more than five times the rate of white jurors, Sotomayor noted, and ran background investigations on some of the most qualified Black juror candidates — while leaving similarly situated white jurors alone. The record, she wrote, revealed "a double standard where the State struck Black jurors who took anything but the most hardline pro-death penalty position, but not white jurors who expressed serious doubts about the death penalty."

The all-conservative Mississippi Supreme Court ruled against Clark. Sotomayor agreed with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to deny his latest appeal, but wrote separately to flag what she called a "problematic standard" in how Mississippi handles racial bias claims from defendants whose lawyers failed to challenge jury selection at trial properly.

Under Mississippi's standard, a defendant must show not only that prosecutors illegally excluded jurors because of their race — but that the trial outcome itself would have been different. Sotomayor said that the standard "imposes the burden to persuade courts of the very conclusion" that the law was designed to prohibit: that a juror's race affects how they vote.

"In the eyes of the Constitution," she wrote, quoting the Court's 2019 ruling in Flowers v. Mississippi, "one racially discriminatory peremptory strike is one too many."

She noted that other courts have taken a narrower approach and called on the Supreme Court to resolve the conflict one day and hold that Mississippi's standard is wrong.

It's the second time Sotomayor has sounded the alarm over Clark's case. In 2023, she dissented when the Court declined Clark's first appeal, writing that "a Black man will be put to death in the State of Mississippi based on the decision of a jury that was plausibly selected based on race."