Griffith v. Kentucky

479 U.S. 314 (1987)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

D was indicted on charges of first-degree robbery, theft by unlawful taking, and being a persistent felony offender in the second degree. D is black. On the first day of trial, attorneys conducted voir dire examination of the jury venire and exercised their peremptory challenges. The prosecution used four of its five allotted challenges to strike four of the five prospective black jurors. The defense used eight of its allotted nine challenges to strike prospective white jurors. There were two duplicate strikes. The two extra jurors who remained because of the duplicate strikes, one of whom was a black person, then were removed by random draw. No black person remained on the jury. D asked the court to request the prosecutor to state his reasons for exercising peremptory challenges against the four prospective black jurors. The request was refused. D then moved for discharge of the panel, alleging that the prosecutor's use of peremptory challenges to remove all but one of the prospective black jurors constituted a violation of D's Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The court denied the motion. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on the charge of first-degree robbery. The jury then found D guilty of being a persistent felony offender and enhanced his sentence to 20 years' imprisonment. The Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed the judgment of conviction. The court rejected D's claim that the prosecutor's use of peremptory challenges deprived him of guaranteed equal protection. The Court noted that an inference of purposeful discrimination could be raised where a prosecutor had engaged in a pattern of challenging black jurors in a series of cases. D petitioned for a writ of certiorari. While his petition was pending, the Court decided Batson v. Kentucky, where it rejected a portion of the reasoning of Swain v. Alabama on which the Kentucky court had relied. Two months later, the court ruled that Batson was not to be applied retroactively to a case on federal habeas review. The Court granted certiorari in D's case, limited to the question of whether the ruling in Batson applies retroactively to a state conviction pending on direct review at the time of the Batson decision.