Proper method for assessing mixed motive in Batson cases

QUESTION PRESENTED This case presents an important question over which lower courts are openly and intractably divided regarding the proper method for assessing mixed motive in Batson cases. In the trial below—of a Black capital defendant—the trial judge found that the prosecutor violated Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986) (Batson) after striking five Black jurors. Concluding that the last stricken juror was eliminated based on race, the trial court ordered that juror reseated. This appeal concerns a prior strike against another Black juror, Herman Taniehill. The prosecutor, caught violating Batson, was unrepentant. In the codefendant’s capital trial a few months later, a different judge found the same prosecutor again violated Batson in striking numerous Black jurors. The meaning of these multiple findings of discrimination is relatively straightforward: this prosecutor, believing based on racial stereotypes that Black jurors were unfavorable in this case, repeatedly eliminated them based upon race and misled two respective trial courts by providing pretextual justifications to shield his true motivations. If, as here, a prosecutor enters jury selection with negative stereotypes of Black jurors in mind, and then acts upon them by striking a juror based on race, what meaning ought this finding have for analysis of strikes against other Black jurors in that same trial? The courts below afforded little, if any, weight to an explicit act of discrimination. Petitioner, however, submits that where a prosecutor both harbors discriminatory views of Black jurors and allows this racial bias to influence their choices in a specific trial, the act of decisionmaking as to all Black jurors in that trial is infected with some degree of racial bias. Though a prosecutor who strikes a Black juror based on race necessarily assumes Black jurors are unfavorable as a general matter, racial animosity or negative stereotypes may not be the only motivation in the exercise of peremptories against Black jurors. Nonetheless, biased views regarding Black jurors are surely one influence on their thinking. Accepting this premise—that decisionmaking by a prosecutor caught violating Batson is necessarily influenced by racial stereotypes and racial bias—leads to the inexorable conclusion that the prosecutor below acted, at best, with mixed motives. This, in turn, leads to the following question: 1. Should this Court resolve the intractable three-way split of authority regarding the proper method for assessing cases of mixed motive in Batson cases? il STATEMENT OF