On November 3, 2015, the Mississippi Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of state prisoner Tony Phillips for assaulting guard Mose Harmon at the Washington County Regional Correctional Facility. Phillips was prosecuted for simple assault and claimed self-defense. A jury convicted him and he was sentenced to five years imprisonment and ordered to pay $500 to the crime victims' compensation fund. Assisted by public defender Hunter Nolan Aikens, he appealed on the grounds that the prosecutor used racially-motivated peremptory strikes and the jury instruction was improper.

The Court of Appeals held that the jury instruction argument was not properly preserved by either objecting to it or raising the issue in a motion for new trial and would fail on the merits had it been properly preserved. Turning its attention to the Batson issue, the court noted that Phillips had objected after the prosecutor used the first four peremptory strikes to exclude four blacks from the jury. The court then allowed the prosecution to offer race-neutral explanations for the strikes, which it did. The defense offered no evidence regarding the race-neutral explanations other than to point out that one was based upon what the prosecutor said an investigator had told him about one potential juror's bad relationship with law enforcement. The court then upheld the strikes.

The court of appeals further noted that the burden of proof that the offered explanations were either pretextual or not race-neutral was on the defense, which had offered no evidence. Therefore, the issue was without merit. The court of appeals affirmed the judgment and sentence.

See: Phillips v. State, 179 So. 3d 1218 (Miss. Ct. App. 2015).

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