Batson v. Kentucky

After sending Batson v. Kentucky back to the lower judicial body, the High Court set forth new rules for peremptory challenges to be used there. If a defendant does not approve of the selected jury, he or she must indicate that there were grounds to "infer" that a juror was excluded because of race--for instance, that both are members of a cognizable minority group. Next, the judge must demand a "neutral" explanation from the prosecutor, shifting the burden of proof to the state. The prosecutor's reasons for rejecting the juror must be based on impartial grounds. The High Court also ruled that either the defense lawyer or the trial judge can object to the peremptory challenge, but it must be raised at the initial trial (not in an appeals case) and before the jury is sworn in.

Justices Burger and Rehnquist dissented from the majority opinion. They deemed it unwise to overturn an established legal precedent, and Rehnquist noted that when peremptory challenges were used broadly--that is, to exclude white jurors from cases involving white defendants, for example, they seemed to be within the law. Other opponents, the most vocal of whom was the National District Attorneys Association, asserted that the Batson ruling provided the defendant in a criminal trial more rights than it did the average citizen. Some legal analysts contended that Batson v. Kentucky would spell the eventual death of the peremptory challenge completely. Indeed, though it originally applied only to criminal cases, it was later expanded to civil trials, and then broadened to include ethnicity and gender discrimination.