Ex-Big Law Attorney Takes Capital Defense Practice to High Court

Joseph Perkovich first got involved in representing a prisoner on death row as a pro bono assignment while working at a corporate law firm.

“The more I saw,” he said, “the more upsetting and baffling it became in terms of how the law worked in this area.”

Perkovich, the rare attorney licensed after an apprenticeship, ultimately left Big Law and built a practice primarily representing capital defendants and others facing severe sentences in post-conviction proceedings. That work takes him to the Supreme Court lectern on Tuesday for the first time, where he’ll argue for a Mississippi man fighting his murder conviction because of alleged racial bias by a prosecutor during jury selection.

It’s the latest in a string of cases Perkovich and his colleagues at the nonprofit law firm Phillips Black have successfully convinced the justices to review.

That includes earning a pair of rare victories last term for death row prisoners, including one where a divided court granted a new trial to an Oklahoma man after finding prosecutorial misconduct violated his constitutional rights.

Perkovich, 56, is arguing the latest case on behalf of Terry Pitchford, who received the death penalty for a felony murder conviction tied to a 2004 armed robbery in which a store owner was killed.

Joseph Perkovich

Photo courtesy of Joseph Perkovich

Pitchford, a Black man, claims prosecutors used targeted peremptory strikes to exclude prospective Black jurors, a violation of Batson v. Kentucky. The 1986 ruling from the Supreme Court established that racial discrimination in jury selection is unconstitutional.

Notwithstanding that precedent, such patterns are “not hard to find in this line of work,” said Perkovich.

“The persistent, invidious practice of removing people based on their race is something that sadly continues 40 years after Batson came down,” he said. “This is a valuable moment for the Supreme Court to again speak for those concerns.”

‘Gaps In Coverage’

Pitchford’s case is typical of the practice Perkovich built at Phillips Black, which he and attorneys John Mills and Jennifer Merrigan formed in 2014 with the goal of filling “gaps in coverage” for death row inmates and other prisoners facing extreme sentences.

The firm now includes roughly 20 attorneys across the US, with some of its notable recent matters including Merrigan’s work on wrongful convictions in Philadelphia.

Perkovich, who grew up in the Los Angeles area, took a circuitous route to the firm. He got an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina and later entered academia. He served at one point as a research director in the University of Oxford’s law faculty focusing on telecom and media regulation.

But he veered from an “academic existence” when he returned to the US. While working a temp job at O’Melveny & Myers in New York, he learned from an offhand comment at a firm Christmas party that an obscure state provision still allowed candidates to qualify to sit for the bar exam through apprenticeships.

“Eventually I got the nerve to ask the managing partner I was working for,” said Perkovich, who remains based in New York. His apprenticeship was ultimately overseen by Zachary Carter, a former US attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Curtis Flowers

Perkovich said he and his co-counsel Joseph Welling got involved in Pitchford’s appeals over eight years ago as he began pursuing federal habeas relief.

As that process played out, the Supreme Court in a 7-2 opinion ruled Doug Evans, the same local district attorney who tried Pitchford, showed a “blatant pattern” of striking Black prospective jurors in the murder trials of Curtis Flowers.

The Flowers prosecution also featured the same trial court as Pitchford, who was 18 at the time of the crime and wasn’t accused of firing the weapon that killed the shopkeeper, according to briefs submitted by Perkovich.

It’s unclear how the justices view the matter. Four years after the Flowers ruling that overturned his conviction, the court declined to review a similar case from a Black death row inmate in Mississippi. That prompted a dissent of that denial from the three liberal justices arguing the court was walking back on its precedent.

The Supreme Court is also considering the case through a narrow question—whether, under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the Mississippi Supreme Court made an unreasonable determination in rejecting Pitchford’s Batson challenge on appeal.

The state high court ruled that Pitchford had waived his right to refute the prosecutor’s race-neutral reasons for using peremptory strikes against four Black jurors by failing to raise them at trial.

Perkovich has argued the trial court actually accepted at face value prosecutors’ rationale for the pattern of strikes against Black jurors, while flouting the requirement to consider all facts and circumstances in establishing purposeful discrimination.

A federal district court initially ruled in favor of Pitchford, vacating the conviction. But the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit later reversed, finding the state court acted properly. The state of Mississippi, backed by the Justice Department, has urged the justices to affirm the decision, while defending the prosecutors’ actions as “legitimate.”

The Supreme Court hears a fraction of appeals on its merits docket, a fact that led Perkovich to be “shocked” when Pitchford’s case was granted review in December.

“It’s all sort of happening fast, at this point,” he said.

“Our practice has had some efficacy in the past couple terms,” he added. “And hopefully that will in some way continue for our clients when we need to seek the court’s review, which is something that does occur with some frequency.”

The case is Pitchford v. Cain, U.S., 24-7351, 3/31/26.