It was the court's second decision in three years on behalf of the inmate, Thomas Miller-El, who is black, and the justices' second rebuke of the federal appeals court that handled his case. The decision itself made no new law; instead, it reflected the judgment of the 6-to-3 majority that the lower courts' refusal to remedy a failure in the criminal justice system now required correction at the highest level.
Justice David H. Souter's majority opinion, noting that "the very integrity of the courts is jeopardized" by racial bias in jury selection, examined aspects of the selection process in unusual detail and concluded that the state's "attempt at a race-neutral rationalization" for what occurred "simply fails to explain what the prosecutors did."
When the evidence is "viewed cumulatively," Justice Souter said, "its direction is too powerful to conclude anything but discrimination." The case was the latest of several recent Supreme Court decisions to express concern about the quality of justice being meted out by the state courts in Texas and by the federal courts that oversee the cases when inmates raise questions of federal law.
In Mr. Miller-El's 1986 trial in the death of a clerk during a robbery at a Holiday Inn in Dallas in 1985, the prosecution used its peremptory strikes to remove 10 of 11 black potential jurors, providing explanations that the Supreme Court found "incredible." Under the writ of habeas corpus that the Supreme Court granted, Texas will now have to retry or release him.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas complained that the majority had permitted itself to be "swayed" by Mr. Miller-El's "charges of racism." He said that "on the basis of facts and law, rather than sentiments, Miller-El does not merit the writ."
Justice Thomas noted that the 1996 federal law defining the federal courts' jurisdiction to grant habeas corpus to state prison inmates required an inmate to show that the state court had based its decision on "an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the state court proceeding."
Mr. Miller-El "has not even come close to such a showing," Justice Thomas said. He was joined in his opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia.
Justice Souter's majority opinion was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
Justice Breyer wrote a concurring opinion to urge the court to rule that peremptory jury challenges should no longer be permitted. Such challenges, which permit each side to remove jurors without explanation, "seem increasingly anomalous in our judicial system," Justice Breyer said. He added that despite the Supreme Court's effort of decades to eradicate bias from jury selection, "the use of race- and gender-based stereotypes in the jury-selection process seems better organized and more systematized than ever before."
The history of this case, Miller-El v. Dretke, No. 03-9659, paralleled the court's modern effort to deal with race and jury selection. Mr. Miller-El was tried, convicted and sentenced to death shortly before the Supreme Court made the rules more favorable for defendants seeking to attack as racially motivated the prosecution's use of peremptory challenges. That 1986 decision, Batson v. Kentucky, applied retroactively to Mr. Miller-El because his case was then still on appeal.
Under the Batson ruling, a prosecutor whose use of peremptory challenges raises an inference of discrimination has to provide an explanation, which the judge can either accept as "race neutral" or reject as a pretext for discrimination. The state trial court in Texas, reviewing the selection of Mr. Miller-El's jury on instruction from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, found the prosecutors' explanations "completely credible and sufficient." The state appeals court affirmed that finding in 1992.
Mr. Miller-El then turned to the federal courts, pressing his claim of racial discrimination by filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, which the federal district court in Dallas denied in 2000. The next year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, ruled that he was not entitled to file an appeal.
That decision was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2003, over the solitary dissent of Justice Thomas. Writing for the majority in Miller-El v. Cockrell, Justice Kennedy said that while Congress, in tightening the standards for habeas corpus, had instructed federal courts to defer to the state courts, "deference does not by definition preclude relief." The evidence of discrimination was substantial enough to require the appeals court to give Mr. Miller-El a hearing, the justices said.
At that hearing, the Fifth Circuit adopted Justice Thomas's dissenting view of the case and found Mr. Miller-El not entitled to habeas corpus. In most cases, that would have been the end of the road; it is rare for the Supreme Court to give an inmate a second chance at an appeal.
But Seth P. Waxman, a former solicitor general who had been handling the case on a pro bono basis, told the justices that by ignoring the Supreme Court majority, the Fifth Circuit's decision "undermines this court's supervisory authority" and needed the court's attention once again. When Mr. Waxman argued the new appeal last December, he urged the court to "step back and look" at the evidence over all, which is what the majority did.
Justice Souter compared white and black jurors who had expressed similar views on the death penalty during initial questioning; the whites were retained and the blacks removed. The prosecution's reasons for the different treatment, he said, "are so far at odds with the evidence that pretext is the fair conclusion, indicating the very discrimination the explanations were meant to deny."
The court issued a second ruling on Monday on race and jury selection. The question in Johnson v. California, No. 04-6964, was how much evidence of possible discrimination must be presented to invoke the Batson decision's requirement of a race-neutral explanation.
The California Supreme Court had required evidence that discrimination was "more likely than not" the reason for the peremptory strike. But Justice Stevens, writing for the 8-to-1 majority on Monday, said that this standard was too onerous. It was sufficient to have "an inference" of discrimination at this initial stage, he said.
Justice Thomas was the lone dissenter.
In another criminal-law case, the court ruled unanimously that inmates facing placement in a "supermax" prison are entitled to due process to guard against mistakes. Reviewing Ohio's procedures for making such placements, including a hearing at which an inmate can testify, the court said in an opinion by Justice Kennedy that inmates' rights were adequately protected. The case was Wilkinson v. Austin, No. 04-495.
Finally, the court refused without comment to take up a challenge by Jose Padilla to his continued detention in a military brig in Charleston, S.C., as an enemy combatant. Lawyers for Mr. Padilla, a United States citizen arrested in Chicago and held since May 2002, had sought to bypass the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., which has scheduled a hearing for July 19.