At the time, Pickering said that "the people of [my] state were heaped with humiliation and embarrassment at the Democratic Convention" in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

[2][3] As a young prosecutor in the 1960s, Pickering worked closely with the FBI to pursue the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.

Cochran won in a three-way general election against Democrat Maurice Dantin and Independent Charles Evers, a well-known figure in the civil rights movement.

In 1979 Pickering ran for state attorney general, but he narrowly lost to Democrat and later Governor, William Allain.

In 1976, Pickering chaired the subcommittee of the Republican Party's Platform Committee, which called for a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade, which established a woman's right to abortion.

On May 25, 2001, during the 107th Congress, President George W. Bush nominated Pickering for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit vacated by Henry Anthony Politz who had taken senior status in 1999, but Pickering's nomination was not acted upon favorably by the Senate Judiciary Committee then under the control of Democratic senator, Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.

Second, he was accused of "glaring racial insensitivity" because of a 1994 hate-crime case in which he decided that 25-year-old Daniel Swan, who had participated with two others in a cross burning, should receive a reduced sentence.

During the course of testimony, Pickering came to suspect that the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division had made a plea bargain with the wrong defendant.

Frustrated with the obstruction of the Senate Democrats, on January 16, 2004, President George W. Bush gave Pickering a recess appointment to the Fifth Circuit.

In December 2004, unable to overcome the filibuster and with his recess appointment about to end, Pickering announced that he was withdrawing his name from consideration as a nominee to the Fifth Circuit and retiring from the federal bench.