Buck v. Commonwealth

George Frederick Buck was found guilty by a jury in the Circuit Court of the County of Chesterfield of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. The circuit court sentenced him to forty years in prison and imposed a $15,000 fine in accordance with the verdict. Buck challenged his conviction, alleging that he was denied constitutional due process and equal protection of the law because the prosecution used two of its peremptory strikes to remove two of the three African-Americans from the jury panel in violation of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986). A panel of the Court of Appeals…