Thurgood Marshall

“ Thus, the "but for" test transforms a difficult credibility assessment-whether the prosecutor acted for the reasons he claims to have acted-into an impossible one-whether a prosecutor's nonracial ground for striking an Afro-American juror, taken alone, would have outweighed the prosecutor's possible grounds for objecting to unchallenged white jurors. The only choice, an untenable one at best, would be to accept at face value a prosecutor's claim that he "would have struck the Afro-American jurors anyway." ”

“ When an employer hires a white candidate over an Afro-American candidate, a factfinder can assess the employer's faithfulness to its own nonracial criteria by examining whether the particular white candidate's qualifications, as defined by the criteria, were superior to those of the Afro-American candidate. In the Batson context, though, the criteria underlying a prosecutor's peremptory challenges are private; a factfinder therefore lacks an independent means of evaluating the prosecutor's decisionmaking. ”

“ This omission in the state court's factual findings provides ample justification for this Court to dispense with the traditional deference, now codified by statute, that such findings are accorded on federal review. See 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (d) (8) (1982 ed.) (presumption of correctness overcome if a federal court concludes that a state court's "factual determination [s] [are] not fairly supported by the record") . ”