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''Batson v. Kentucky'', 476 U.S. 79 (1986), was a landmark decision of the
United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...
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 The Equal Protection Clause is part of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides "nor shall any State... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal pr ...
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 The Supreme Court of California is the highest and final court of appeals in the courts of the U.S. state of California. It is headquartered in San Francisco at the Earl Warren Building, but it regularly holds sessions in Los Angeles and Sac ...
in 1978, the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) is the highest court in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Although the claim is disputed by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the SJC claims the distinction of being the oldest continuously fu ...
in 1979, and the
Florida Supreme Court The Supreme Court of Florida is the state supreme court, highest court in the U.S. state of Florida. It consists of seven justices—one of whom serves as Chief Justice. Six members are chosen from six districts around the state to foster geog ...
in 1984.


Background

James Kirkland Batson was an
African American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...
man convicted of
burglary Burglary, also called breaking and entering (B&E) or housebreaking, is a property crime involving the illegal entry into a building or other area without permission, typically with the intention of committing a further criminal offence. Usually ...
and receipt of stolen goods in a
Louisville Louisville is the most populous city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, sixth-most populous city in the Southeast, and the 27th-most-populous city in the United States. By land area, it is the country's 24th-largest city; however, by populatio ...
,
Kentucky Kentucky (, ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north, West Virginia to the ...
circuit court by a
jury A jury is a sworn body of people (jurors) convened to hear evidence, make Question of fact, findings of fact, and render an impartiality, impartial verdict officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a sentence (law), penalty or Judgmen ...
composed entirely of white jurors. The key part of his appeal was based on the jury selection, or ''
voir dire (; often ; from an Anglo-Norman term in common law meaning "to speak the truth") is a legal term for procedures during a trial that help a judge decide certain issues: * Prospective jurors are questioned to decide whether they can be fair and i ...
'', 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. The defendant appealed his conviction to the
Kentucky Supreme Court The Kentucky Supreme Court is the state supreme court of the U.S. state of Kentucky. Prior to its creation by constitutional amendment in 1975, the Kentucky Court of Appeals was the only appellate court in Kentucky. The Kentucky Court of Ap ...
, 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 In law, ''certiorari'' is a court process to seek judicial review of a decision of a lower court or government agency. ''Certiorari'' comes from the name of a prerogative writ in England, issued by a superior court to direct that the recor ...
''.


The Supreme Court's decision

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 ''Prima facie'' (; ) is a Latin expression meaning "at first sight", or "based on first impression". The literal translation would be "at first face" or "at first appearance", from the feminine forms of ' ("first") and ' ("face"), both in the a ...
'' 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 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

In his dissenting opinion, Chief Justice
Warren Burger Warren Earl Burger (September 17, 1907 – June 25, 1995) was an American attorney who served as the 15th chief justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Burger graduated from the St. Paul College of Law i ...
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

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

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''. In some cases, parties have appealed a verdict or judgment and asked it be invalidated because one or more peremptory challenges excluded a cognizable group from the jury. Although the ''Batson'' decision addressed jury selection in criminal trials, in 1991 the Supreme Court later extended the same rule to civil trials in '' Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company''. In 1994, in '' J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B.'', the Court held that peremptory challenges based on sex alone violated the standard established in ''Batson'' as well. The authority of ''Batson'' was reinforced by a pair of 2005 decisions, '' Miller-El v. Dretke'' and '' Johnson v. California''. The first expanded the evidence that can be considered when establishing that a peremptory challenge was based solely on objectionable criteria. The second addressed the standard of proof by which a Batson challenge should be assessed, finding that it was sufficient to require "an inference" that discrimination was the basis for a peremptory challenge rather than proof that discrimination was "more likely than not" its basis. ''Batson'' has been applied to the discriminatory use of peremptory strikes against judges in a California case, ''Superior Court v. Williams''. Defense counsel objected to the prosecution's motion to disqualify an African-American judge, suspecting that the motion was racially motivated. The Court noted that use of Equal Protection in ''Batson'' to combat racially discriminatory strikes against jurors was well established and that subsequent decisions had extended these protections in other contexts. The Court held that "these principles are equally applicable to race-based challenges to judges."


''U.S. v. Blaylock''

An attempt to extend ''Batson'' to cover challenges based on
sexual orientation Sexual orientation is an enduring personal pattern of romantic attraction or sexual attraction (or a combination of these) to persons of the opposite sex or gender, the same sex or gender, or to both sexes or more than one gender. Patterns ar ...
failed in 2005. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a defendant's criminal appeal in ''U.S. v. Blaylock'', because it found the prosecution had "offered legitimate nondiscriminatory reasons for striking the panel member". The court did not consider whether the ''Batson'' challenge rule applied, but its opinion expressed doubt that it did.


''SmithKline v. Abbott''

Extending ''Batson'' to cover challenges based on sexual orientation was revisited again in 2012, this time in a civil case. A three-judge panel of the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (in case citations, 9th Cir.) is the U.S. federal court of appeals that has appellate jurisdiction over the U.S. district courts for the following federal judicial districts: * Distric ...
considered the issue in ''SmithKline Beecham Corporation v. Abbott Laboratories'': It ruled unanimously in a landmark decision on January 21, 2014, that, based on the U.S. Supreme Court decision in ''
United States v. Windsor ''United States v. Windsor'', 570 U.S. 744 (2013), is a List of landmark court decisions in the United States, landmark United States Supreme Court civil rights case concerning same-sex marriage in the United States, same-sex marriage. The Cou ...
'', distinctions based on sexual orientation are subject to the "heightened scrutiny" standard of review and that "equal protection prohibits peremptory strikes based on sexual orientation". Defendant
Abbott Laboratories Abbott Laboratories is an American multinational medical devices and health care company with headquarters in Abbott Park, Illinois, in the United States. The company was founded by Chicago physician Wallace Calvin Abbott in 1888 to formulate k ...
decided not to appeal further. However, at least one circuit judge ''
sua sponte In law, ''sua sponte'' (Latin: "of his, her, its, or their own accord") or ''suo motu/suo moto'' ("on its own motion") describes an act of authority taken without formal prompting by another party. The term is usually applied to actions taken by a ...
'' called for rehearing en banc, and on March 27 the court asked both parties to file briefs on the question. On June 24, the judges of the Ninth Circuit voted not to rehear the case en banc.


Subsequent Supreme Court cases

* Allen v. Hardy, 478 U.S. 255 (1986) * Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314 (1987) * Ross v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 81 (1988) * Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989) * Holland v. Illinois, 493 U.S. 474 (1990) * Alvarado v. United States, 497 U.S. 543 (1990) * Ford v. Georgia, 498 U.S. 411 (1991) * Powers v. Ohio, 499 U.S. 400 (1991) * Hernandez v. New York, 500 U.S. 352 (1991) * Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., 500 U.S. 614 (1991) * Trevino v. Texas, 503 U.S. 562 (1992) * Georgia v. McCollum, 505 U.S. 42 (1992) * JEB v. Alabama Ex Rel. TB, 511 U.S. 127 (1994) * Purkett v. Elem, 514 U.S. 765 (1995) * Campbell v. Louisiana, 523 U.S. 392 (1998) * Miller-El v. Cockrell, 537 U.S. 322 (2003) * Johnson v. California, 541 U.S. 428 (2004) * Johnson v. California, 545 U.S. 162 (2005) * Miller-El v. Dretke, 545 U.S. 231 (2005) * Rice v. Collins, 546 U.S. 333 (2006) * Snyder v. Louisiana, 552 U.S. 472 (2008) * Rivera v. Illinois, 556 U.S. 148 * Thaler v. Haynes, 559 U.S. 1088 (2010) * Felkner v. Jackson, 562 U.S. 594 * '' Davis v. Ayala'' * '' Foster v. Chatman'' * '' Flowers v. Mississippi''


Case participants after ''Batson''

When the Supreme Court reversed his conviction, Batson was serving a twenty-year sentence. Rather than risk a retrial, he pleaded guilty to burglary and received a five-year prison sentence. After his release, Batson was convicted of several offenses including burglary, theft, receiving stolen property, and persistent-felony convictions. He was released from prison again in January 2003 and remains on parole through 2026. Since his release, he worked as a construction worker and later said of the media attention the case received: "It's so old, they ought to let it go". Joe Gutmann, the prosecutor in Batson's 1982 trial, said he had removed the black members of the venire not because of their race, but because they were young and might sympathize with Batson. He later stated that the Supreme Court's decision was "a good one" because it prevents lawyers from discriminating in jury selection. He left the prosecutor's office in 2001 and, since then, taught government and history at the predominantly black, inner-city Louisville Central High School. Batson and Gutmann later met while Batson was distributing a book he had written trying to discourage youth from crime. The two reconciled and have since become good friends.


See also

*
All-white jury Racial discrimination in jury selection is specifically prohibited by law in many jurisdictions throughout the world. In the United States, it has been defined through a series of judicial decisions. However, juries composed solely of one racial ...
* '' Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co.'' (1991) * '' Georgia v. McCollum'' (1992) * '' J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B.'' (1994) * '' Snyder v. Louisiana'' (2008) * '' Flowers v. Mississippi'' (2019)


References


External links

* {{Equal protection and criminal procedure, jury, state=collapsed 1986 in Kentucky 1986 in United States case law History of Louisville, Kentucky Jefferson County, Kentucky Legal history of Kentucky United States Supreme Court cases of the Burger Court United States Supreme Court cases United States Supreme Court decisions that overrule a prior Supreme Court decision United States racial discrimination case law 1980s in Louisville, Kentucky United States equal protection case law