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Habeas And Hubris, Barry Friedman

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1965 the Supreme Court made clear that state prosecutors were virtually free to exercise peremptory challenges to remove blacks from criminal juries for no reason other than their race.' Roughly twenty years later the Supreme Court changed its mind: "The core guarantee of equal protection . . . would be meaningless were we to approve the exclusion of jurors on the basis of such assumptions [of bias], which arise solely from the jurors' race."

The right to counsel experienced a similar reversal of fortune. About fifty years ago the Court decided that "fundamental fairness" and a "universal sense of …