Court Opinion

ID: 9524989
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:58:59.59531+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:12:28.906909
License: Public Domain

DeBRULER, Justice,
dissenting.
The majority opinion accurately identifies the test to be applied when the prosecution's exercise of peremptory challenges of prospective petit jurors is challenged on equal protection grounds. Here, the trial prosecutor's peremptory challenge of black jurors raised an inference of racially dis-eriminatory purpose. The burden was then shifted to the prosecution to come forward with a neutral explanation for challenging black jurors. Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986). We know that such an explanation need not rise to the level of a basis for challenge for cause on the one hand, but must rise above the level of an intuitive judgment that persons are partial to those of the same race. We are also instructed that a neutral explanation will be one which bears a relation to the particular case to be tried. Id. In his concurring opinion in Batson, Justice White was of the opinion that a neutral explanation is one supported by trial-related reasons of a satisfactory nature and not the belief that black jurors should not be allowed to judge a black defendant. Id., 476 U.S. at 101, 106 S.Ct. at 1725, 90 L.Ed.2d at 90-91. Justice Marshall feared the courts might totally undermine equal protection by finding neutral explanations in such ethereal statements as:
1. The juror had a son about the same age as the defendant.
2. The juror seemed uncommunicative.
3. The juror never cracked a smile and. therefore did not possess the sensitivities necessary to realistically look at the issues and decide the facts in this case. |
Id., 476 U.S. at 106, 106 S.Ct. at 1728, 90 L.Ed.2d at 94, (Marshall, J., concurring).
In this case, papers taken from the vie-tim had to be introduced into evidence by the prosecution which showed that the vie-tim enjoyed racist jokes with blacks and hispanics as their targets. The trial prosecutor naturally judged that black jurors, becoming aware of this trait of their star witness, would tend to be hostile toward his plight. The trial prosecutor exercised the State's peremptory challenge because the jurors were black and being black and a juror in this case evidenced not a sympathy for the black defendant, but hostility toward the State's chief witness and indeed the State's case. While the test of Batson is multi-pronged, the thrust is singular, namely that we will not tolerate purposeful racial discrimination in the process by which the jury in a criminal case is selected. In my opinion, while the prosecutor exercised the peremptory challenges on the basis of race and the hostility toward the State's case which that race may bespeak, the motivation of the prosecutor was not purposeful racial discrimination. The prosecutor here did not attempt to rob the defendant of any benefit which might flow from black participation on the jury, or to *468gain any benefit which might flow to the prosecution from an all-white jury. It was very specific and fact-related and did not have the egregious character of those explanations considered by Justice Marshall beneath which invidious discriminatory intent may easily be hidden. The prosecutor's explanation, while based upon race, was nevertheless a neutral one related to the particular case to be tried and therefore satisfying the commands of equal protection.
A satisfactory test of whether this prosecutor provided a neutral explanation for his use of peremptory challenges against black jurors would be whether, in the opinion of the court, he would have been motivated to make those same peremptory challenges if the defendants had been white. It is manifest that this prosecutor would have exercised his peremptory challenges against black jurors even if the appellants had been white, because any tendency of black jurors to be unsympathetic with the State's case by reason of the racist tendencies of the alleged victim would not have been diminished by reason of the race of the defendants.
SHEPARD, C.J., concurs.