J. E. B. v. Alabama ex rel T. B.

Three justices joined Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion. (Chief Justice Rehnquist, separately, also mentioned that he could not find so many similarities between sex and race discrimination. Accordingly, he would not accept the ruling in Batson v. Kentucky as reference for such holdings of the majority.) Scalia thought that this decision of the majority could damage administration of justice by reducing the strength of peremptory challenges. He said that peremptory challenges had the purpose of achieving the goal in impartial and fair trials and that the use of peremptory strikes on the basis of sex could not cause the same harm as peremptories directed to African American jurors. The minority opinion criticized the Court's reliance on historical discrimination against woman to find use of peremptory challenges unconstitutional. Justice Scalia found it irrelevant and argued that no indicators existed which would show that the petitioner suffered some impairment because, like the respondent, he also had a chance to exercise his peremptory strikes. Scalia pointed out that the Court actually supported the petitioner's claim although harm was not done to him but to stricken jurors. Dissenting justices maintained that the coexistence of peremptory challenges with the Equal Protection Clause should have not been questioned because the main purpose of peremptories was to provide litigants with the opportunity to seat an impartial jury. The Court's decision thus appeared to diminish the purpose of peremptories especially when the primary feature of peremptories was that reasons for strikes did not have to be given. Consequently, the minority justices believed the judicial system could be adversely affected because the Court seemed to be promoting a practice that could end up with "quests for reasoned peremptories."