Green v. Lamarque

BEA, Circuit Judge:

While selecting a jury for a criminal trial in Alameda County, California, the prosecutor used peremptory challenges to exclude from the jury all six African-Americans on the jury panel. The African-American defendant claimed the prosecutor based such challenges on race. The prosecutor then offered race-neutral reasons which, we now conclude, also applied to unchallenged white jurors. This disparity in treatment convinces us the nonracial reasons claimed by the prosecutor were pretexts. Because the elimination of even a single juror due to race taints the trial, we reverse…