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There are Supreme Court cases that arrive draped in abstraction. Their stakes are real, but the dispute comes to the court in such rarefied doctrinal form that the underlying injury almost disappears. Then there are cases like Pitchford v. Cain, in which the doctrinal maze is itself the story. By the time Terry Pitchford’s claim reached the justices last week, the central question was no longer simply whether racial discrimination had infected the selection of the jury that convicted him and sent him to death row. It was whether federal courts, hemmed in by the modern law of habeas corpus, are permitted to say anything meaningful about that possibility at all.

That is what made last week’s Pitchford arguments so revealing. On one level, the case concerns a familiar constitutional principle. Batson v. Kentucky holds that prosecutors may not use peremptory strikes to exclude prospective jurors on the basis of race. On another level, though, Pitchford is about what happens when that principle collides with the punishing procedural architecture of modern postconviction review. A court can believe that racial discrimination in jury selection is intolerable. It can say, correctly, that such discrimination degrades the defendant, the excluded jurors, and the legitimacy of the justice system itself. But if the claim reaches federal court through habeas, after state review, and under the command of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 that federal judges defer unless a state court is not just wrong but unreasonable, even a serious equal protection claim can be reduced to a narrower and more desiccated inquiry: Did the defendant’s lawyer say enough, precisely enough, quickly enough, at exactly the right moment, to preserve the argument?

Pitchford was tried in Grenada County, Mississippi, in 2006 for a capital murder committed when he was 18. The county was about 40 percent Black. The jury that convicted him included one Black juror. According to Pitchford’s briefing, the prosecutor, Doug Evans, marked prospective jurors by race, using W and B, then struck each of the first four qualified Black jurors while accepting 16 of the first 18 qualified white jurors. Three of the Black jurors Evans struck were never asked any questions during voir dire. The prosecutor and the trial judge were not unfamiliar names. They were the same prosecutor and judge who later appeared in Flowers v. Mississippi, the 2019 Supreme Court decision condemning Evans’ pattern of striking Black prospective jurors in each of the six trials in which Curtis Flowers faced the death penalty.

At trial, after the state struck four Black prospective jurors, defense counsel raised a Batson objection. She argued that there appeared to be a trend of striking almost all of the available Black jurors and reminded the court that the jury had already become disproportionately white because of cause challenges, including death qualification. She also invoked Miller-El v. Dretke, another Supreme Court case involving racial discrimination in jury selection. The trial judge then asked the state for race-neutral reasons for the strikes. The judge accepted each explanation as race neutral and moved on.

That last sentence is where the law starts to split into two narratives. Pitchford’s narrative is that the trial court conducted only the first two steps of Batson and skipped the third. Under Batson, the first step asks whether the defendant has made a prima facie showing of discrimination. The second........

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