Opinion ID: 703968
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Jury Selection Facts

Text: 8 The jury was struck from a group of thirty venire members, four of whom were black. The defendants used three of their peremptory strikes to remove three of the four blacks from the jury. After all of the strikes of both sides had been exercised, one black female, Ms. Carter, was left on the jury. Before the jury was impaneled, however, the government objected that the defendants' strikes of the three other black venire members were racially discriminatory. After requiring the defendants to explain those three strikes, the district court found that two of the three strikes had been sufficiently race neutral in motivation but that the defendants had stricken Ms. Robertson because of her race, and it ordered her seated on the jury. 9 Because of the mechanics of the process used to select the jury, the district court's action in returning Ms. Robertson to the jury had the ironic effect of displacing Ms. Carter from it. Thus, the net result of the court's action sustaining the government's Batson challenge to the strike of Ms. Robertson was that one black female replaced another on the jury.