Batson v. Kentucky

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"Batson case" redirects here. For the 1902 murder case often called the Batson case, see Earll family murders .

1986 United States Supreme Court case

Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court ruling that a prosecutor's use of a peremptory challenge in a criminal case—the dismissal of jurors without stating a valid cause for doing so—may not be used to exclude jurors based solely on their race. The Court ruled that this practice violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment . The case gave rise to the term Batson challenge, an objection to a peremptory challenge based on the standard established by the Supreme Court's decision in this case. Subsequent jurisprudence has resulted in the extension of Batson to civil cases (_Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company ) and cases where jurors are excluded on the basis of sex (J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B. _).

The principle had been established previously by several state courts, including the California Supreme Court in 1978, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1979, and the Florida Supreme Court in 1984.

Background

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James Kirkland Batson was an African American man convicted of burglary and receipt of stolen goods in a Louisville, Kentucky circuit court by a jury composed entirely of white jurors . The key part of his appeal was based on the jury selection, or _voir dire _, phase of the trial. During jury selection, potential jurors are examined by the Court, the prosecution, and the defense, to determine their competence, willingness, and suitability to hear, deliberate and decide a case put to them to render a verdict. During voir dire the judge can dismiss jurors, and both the prosecution and the defense have a limited number of peremptory challenges , which are accepted on their face, as the right of the party making the challenge and which they use to excuse any juror for any reason which the particular side believes will help their case.

In this case, the judge dismissed several potential jurors for various causes . The defense peremptorily challenged nine potential jurors and the prosecutor, Joe Gutmann, peremptorily challenged six, including all four black potential jurors, and a jury composed only of white persons was selected. The defense counsel moved to discharge the whole jury on the ground that the prosecutor's removal of black people from the jury pool violated petitioner's rights under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to a jury drawn from a cross section of the community, and under the Fourteenth Amendment to equal protection of the laws. Without expressly ruling on petitioner's request for a hearing, the trial judge denied the motion, and the jury ultimately convicted the defendant.[_citation needed
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The defendant appealed his conviction to the Kentucky Supreme Court , which affirmed the conviction. That court cited _Swain v. Alabama _, and held that a defendant alleging lack of a fair cross section must demonstrate systematic exclusion of a group of jurors from the panel of prospective jurors. That is, the defendant had to show that not just in his case, but as a process, juries in his community were being constructed so as to not represent a cross section of that community. Batson continued his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted _certiorari .[citation needed
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The Supreme Court's decision

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In a 7–2 decision authored by Justice Lewis Powell , the Supreme Court ruled in Batson's favor. The court overruled Swain v. Alabama by lowering the burden of proof that a defendant must meet to make a _prima facie _ case of purposeful discrimination. In Swain, the Court had recognized that a "State's purposeful or deliberate denial to Negroes on account of race of participation as jurors in the administration of justice violates the Equal Protection Clause", but that the defendant had the burden of proving a systematic striking of black jurors throughout the county, that is, that the peremptory challenge system as a whole was being perverted. In Batson the court ruled that the defendant could make a prima facie case for purposeful racial discrimination in jury selection by relying on the record only in his own case. The Court explained:

The defendant first must show that he is a member of a cognizable racial group, and that the prosecutor has exercised peremptory challenges to remove from the venire [jury pool] members of the defendant's race. The defendant may also rely on the fact that peremptory challenges constitute a jury selection practice that permits those to discriminate who are of a mind to discriminate. Finally, the defendant must show that such facts and any other relevant circumstances raise an inference that the prosecutor used peremptory challenges to exclude the veniremen from the petit jury on account of their race. Once the defendant makes a prima facie showing, the burden shifts to the State to come forward with a neutral explanation for challenging black jurors.

The Court also held that:

• A State denies a black defendant equal protection when it puts him on trial before a jury from which members of his race have been purposely excluded
• A defendant has no right to a petit jury composed in whole or in part of persons of his own race. However, the Equal Protection Clause guarantees the defendant that the State will not exclude members of his race from the jury venire on account of race, or on the false assumption that members of his race as a group are not qualified to serve as jurors
• The peremptory challenge occupies an important position in trial procedures

Justice Marshall, concurring with the majority, called the decision "historic" but added: "The decision today will not end the racial discrimination that peremptories inject into the jury-selection process. That goal can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely."

Dissents

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In his dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Warren Burger argued that the court's decision in Batson "sets aside the peremptory challenge, a procedure which has been part of the common law for many centuries and part of our jury system for nearly 200 years". He believed the majority was replacing peremptory challenges with something very similar to challenge for cause, but was unclear in explaining the standard to be applied. "I am at a loss to discern the governing principles here", he wrote. "I join my colleagues in wishing the nation's judges well as they struggle to grasp how to implement today's holding."

Justice Rehnquist wrote that the majority misapplied equal protection doctrine: "In my view, there is simply nothing 'unequal' about the state using its peremptory challenges to strike blacks from the jury in cases involving black defendants, so long as such challenges are also used to exclude whites in cases involving white defendants, Hispanics in cases involving Hispanic defendants, Asians in cases involving Asian defendants, and so on."

Impact

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Whether the principles of Batson applied retroactively to anyone convicted previously by juries whose racial composition was influenced by peremptory challenges not consistent with this opinion was for a time uncertain. In Allen v. Hardy (1986), the Court held that it did not apply retroactively to collateral review of final convictions. In _Griffith v. Kentucky _ (1987), it decided it would apply it in cases on direct review.

Batson challenge

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The term Batson challenge describes an objection to opposing counsel's use of a peremptory challenge to exclude a juror from the jury pool based on criteria the courts have found disqualifying, as race was the sole rationale for exclusion in Batson.

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