U.S. Supreme Court won’t take up Mississippi death row inmate’s appeal

By Mina Corpuz | Originally published by Mississippi Today

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up the case of Mississippi death row inmate Tony Terrell Clark, who argued there was racial bias in the makeup of the jury that convicted him.

Clark, who will turn 46 this month, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2014 shooting death of a 13-year-old boy and the attempted murder of the boy’s father, who were both working at a convenience store in Canton. 

To date, the state has not requested an execution date for him. 

Although she agreed with the  decision not to hear Clark’s appeal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a separate six-page statement to call out “the problematic standard” that the Mississippi Supreme Court applied in Clark’s case under Batson v. Kentucky in the context of a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel under Strickland v. Washington. 

In 1986, the nation’s high court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that people could not be struck from jury service because of race, and it set up a test for trial judges to determine whether a strike is discriminatory. 

Two years earlier in 1984, the court in Strickland v. Washington established a test to determine when a defendant’s right to effective assistance of counsel was violated by inadequate representation. 

Sotomayor noted that the prosecution in Clark’s case struck Black prospective jurors at a rate more than five times that of white jurors and conducted dubious “special investigations into some of the most qualified Black prospective jurors in an attempt to disqualify them,” but did not investigate similarly situated white jurors. 

On Clark’s appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court, justices said his defense attorney didn’t present a “comparative analysis of minority and non-minority jurors to show disparate treatment” during the Baton proceedings. That led Clark to file a petition in state court, citing ineffective counsel.

Clark’s attorneys argued in a January petition that the Mississippi Supreme Court had refused to review his Batson claims stemming from trial. He also raised Batson challenges in post-conviction, which were denied. 

The state had used seven peremptory strikes against Black people during jury selection. His trial attorneys raised a challenge under Batson after five Black potential jurors were struck, which the state withdrew. During a second Batson hearing, the challenge was denied. 

That led to a jury with 11 white jurors, one Black juror and two white alternate jurors. 

In affirming his conviction and sentence in direct appeal, the Mississippi Supreme Court wrote “(t)he case before us is not Flowers,” referencing the case of Curtis Flowers that Clark cited. Flowers, another Black Mississippi man convicted of capital murder, argued there was racial bias during his jury selection. 

The high court returned Flowers’ case to the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2016, and after that court reaffirmed the conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Flowers’ case. In 2019, it overturned his murder convictions and death sentence, leading to his release from prison over 20 years after the 1997 conviction. 

Other cases with Batson challenges have cited the Flowers case, including that of Terry Pitchford, with whom the U.S. Supreme Court sided on May 28. 

In Clark’s case, the state Supreme Court ruled that prejudice from his attorney’s ineffective presentation of the Batson claim requires proving not only that the claim would have succeeded but would have resulted in Clark’s acquittal.

“The Court should one day resolve the conflict outlined above and hold that Strickland does not require the kind of prejudice analysis that the Mississippi Supreme Court has adopted for Batson-related ineffectiveness claims,” Sotomayor wrote. 

She said Clark’s case, in its current procedural state, doesn’t present a “viable path” to resolve that conflict. 

In post-conviction, Clark’s attorneys also argued that he was intellectually disabled under Atkins v. Virginia, and therefore it is unconstitutional to execute him. In 2023, the Mississippi Supreme Court remanded his case to Madison County Circuit Court to hold an Atkins hearing. The trial court has granted experts access to Clark in prison, according to court records. 

He is pursuing post-conviction relief in Madison County Circuit Court based on Atkins v. Virginia, filing a petition for relief on the same day the high court’s decision. 

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article