explaining that “a prohibition of the exercise of discriminatory peremptory challenges [does not] violate a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to the effective assistance of counsel . . . . [because] neither the Sixth Amendment right nor the attorney-client privilege gives a criminal defendant the right to carry out through counsel an unlawful course of conduct”
How later courts described this case
- explaining that “a prohibition of the exercise of discriminatory peremptory challenges [does not] violate a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to the effective assistance of counsel . . . . [because] neither the Sixth Amendment right nor the attorney-client privilege gives a criminal defendant the right to carry out through counsel an unlawful course of conduct”
- stating that the majority’s opinion, which extended Batson to a white defendant’s peremptory challenges aimed at removing all African-Americans from the jury, would apply with equal force to the case of a minority defendant’s exercise of peremptory challenges to remove white prospective jurors
- holding a criminal defendant may not use a peremptory strike in a discriminatory manner because "[r]egardless of who invokes the discriminatory challenge, there can be no doubt that the harm is the same — in all cases, the juror is subjected to open and public racial discrimination”
- holding that "[i]n our heterogenous society policy as well as constitutional considerations militate against the divisive assumption as a per se rule that justice in a court of law may turn upon the pigmentation of skin, the accident of birth, or the choice of religion"
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Justice Scalia,
dissenting.
I agree with the Court that its judgment follows logically from Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., 500 U. S. 614 (1991). For the reasons given in the Edmonson dissents, however, I think that case was wrongly decided. Barely a year later, we witness its reduction to the terminally absurd:
*70 A criminal defendant, in the process of defending himself against the state, is held to be acting on behalf of the state. Justice O’Connor demonstrates the sheer inanity of this proposition (in case the mere statement of it does not suffice), and the contrived nature of the Court’s justifications. I see no need to add to her discussion, and differ from her views only in that I do not consider Edmonson distinguishable in principle — except in the principle that a bad decision should not be followed logically to its illogical conclusion.
Today’s decision gives the lie once again to the belief that an activist, “evolutionary” constitutional jurisprudence always evolves in the direction of greater individual rights. In the interest of promoting the supposedly greater good of race relations in the society as a whole (make no mistake that that is what underlies all of this), we use the Constitution to destroy the ages-old right of criminal defendants to exercise peremptory challenges as they wish, to secure a jury that they consider fair. I dissent.