United States v. Martinez-Salazar

In Ross v. Oklahoma, 487 U. S. 81 (1988), this Court reaffirmed that “peremptory challenges [to prospective jurors] are not of constitutional dimension,” id., at 88; rather, they are one means to achieve the constitutionally required end of an impartial jury. We address in this case a problem in federal jury selection left open in Ross. See id., at 91, n. 4. We focus on this sequence of events: the erroneous refusal of a trial judge to dismiss a potential juror for cause, followed by the defendant’s exercise of a peremptory challenge to remove that juror. Confronting that order of events, the…