SAN FRANCISCO Justice Goodwin Liu made it 18 months on the California Supreme Court without a dissent in a death penalty case. That changed Monday, thanks to a prosecutor who used peremptory challenges to strike five African-American women from the jury and a trial judge who said she, too, found African-American women reluctant to impose the death penalty.
"This is precisely the sort of reliance on racial and gender stereotypes that Batson [v. Kentucky] is intended to eliminate," wrote Liu, adding that the Supreme Court’s extreme deference to the trial judge was putting it on the wrong side of a federal circuit split.
