Batson v. Kentucky

Batson v. Kentucky
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 12, 1985 Decided April 30, 1986
Full case name	Batson v. Kentucky
Citations	476 U.S. 79 (more) 106 S. Ct. 1712; 90 L. Ed. 2d 69; 1986 U.S. LEXIS 150; 54 U.S.L.W. 4425
Case history
Prior	Defendant found guilty in Kentucky Circuit Court; Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed; cert. granted, 471 U.S. 1052 (1985)
Subsequent	Remanded
Holding
The principle announced in Strauder v. West Virginia is reaffirmed; prosecutors may not use race as a factor in making peremptory challenges; defendants must only make a prima facie showing on the evidence from their case to mount a challenge to race-based use of peremptories.
Court membership
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun Lewis F. Powell Jr. · William Rehnquist John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor
Case opinions
Majority	Powell, joined by Brennan, White, Marshall, Blackmun, Stevens, O'Connor
Concurrence	White
Concurrence	Marshall
Concurrence	Stevens, joined by Brennan
Concurrence	O'Connor
Dissent	Burger, joined by Rehnquist
Dissent	Rehnquist, joined by Burger
Laws applied
U.S. Const., amend. XIV
This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
Swain v. Alabama (1965)

Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court ruling that a prosecutor's use of a peremptory challenge in a criminal case—the dismissal of jurors without stating a valid cause for doing so—may not be used to exclude jurors based solely on their race. The Court ruled that this practice violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case gave rise to the term Batson challenge, an objection to a peremptory challenge based on the standard established by the Supreme Court's decision in this case. Subsequent jurisprudence has resulted in the extension of Batson to civil cases (Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company) and cases where jurors are excluded on the basis of sex (J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B.).

The principle had been established previously by several state courts, including the California Supreme Court in 1978, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1979, and the Florida Supreme Court in 1984.^[1]