Court Opinion

ID: 9836792
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-02 03:15:04.80198+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:45:18.910173
License: Public Domain

SULLIVAN, Judge
(concurring in the result):
I continue to adhere to my position in United States v. Tulloch, 47 MJ 283, 289 (1997)(Sullivan, J., dissenting), that we should follow Purkett v. Elem, 514 U.S. 765, 115 S.Ct. 1769, 131 L.Ed.2d 834 (1995).
I also write separately to reiterate my previous suggestion that the military justice system should eliminate the peremptory challenge. See United States v. Witham, 47 MJ 297, 303 n.3 (1997); United States v. Tulloch, 47 MJ 283, 289 (1997)(Sullivan, J., dissenting); Sullivan and Amar, Jury Reform in America — A Return to the Old Country, 33 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 1141 (1996); cf. Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 107, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986) (Marshall, J., concurring). The peremptory challenge in the military, as it stands in the current of present Supreme Court and our Court’s case law, may have outlived its usefulness and benefit. Congress and the President should relook this long established right to strike off a jury, a juror without a judicially sanctioned cause. Real and perceived racial and gender abuses lie beneath the surface of the sea of peremptory challenges.