"Liu Lambasts Colleagues' Approach to 'Batson' Challenges," is Scott Graham's report in the Recorder, a Law.com publication.
Ripping what he called "a jurisprudence of 'don't ask, don't tell,'" California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu said Monday his colleagues are turning a blind eye to race-based peremptory challenges and flouting a U.S. Supreme Court admonition that courts spell out reasons for denying such challenges.Liu took the extraordinary step of counting up the 102 opinions in which the California Supreme Court has examined race-based jury challenges — commonly known as Batson challenges — in the last 20 years, and reported that the court has turned away all but one.
"The nearly absolute uniformity of results produced by this court's Batson jurisprudence is striking," he wrote, pointing out that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, for example, has clamped down on Batson rulings at least five times in the last eight years.
Liu is the only Democratic appointee on the California Supreme Court, but has seemed to stake out a moderate left-of-center approach in his two years on the bench. Even today's rulings were issued as separate concurrences.
But the opinions, which came in three capital cases, were as fiercely worded as any dissent and sparked mild rebukes from the majority authors.
The three California cases are: People v. Harris, People v. Mai, and People v. Jones.
More on Batson v. Kentucky, the 1986 Supreme Court ruling, is via Oyez.
Additional Batson resources includes coverage of a 2011 University of Iowa College of Law symposium, Batson at 25, as well as an Equal Justice Initiative 2010 report on race and jury selection.
Related posts are in the race category index.
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