Justice Baker's opinion begins with a fairly powerful summary of the holding of the case:
"At defendant and appellant Salvador Salinas’s (defendant’s) criminal trial, the prosecution used five of the eight peremptory challenges it exercised to remove Black women from the jury panel—including a prospective juror who was a sales manager, a crime victim herself, the grandchild of a retired police officer, a friend or acquaintance of “a lot” of law enforcement officers, and a prior member of a criminal jury in another case that reached a verdict."
Yeah, that's a problem. You can see why the conviction gets reversed.
Personally, I was less influenced than Justice Baker was with the exclusion of the four other Black women (though I totally understand where he's coming from). Were I the prosecutor, based on what I've read in the opinion based upon their answers in voir dire, I might well have bounced some -- or all -- of these four women myself, without even knowing what race/gender they were. Some of those answers made me think that these potential jurors might well be a bit more . . . critical than prosecutors are typically looking for in a juror. (Not that that's necessarily normatively right, but it's descriptively very true.)
But I'm totally on board for the fifth Black woman juror. I see absolutely zero reason why she should have been bounced -- or even (apart from her race and gender) why a prosecutor would think that she'd be pro-defendant. That one, I agree, is a Batson/Wheeler violation.
Justice Baker makes the same point that I'm about to make in a slightly different way, but I think there's something super problematic about the overall structure of the whole peremptory challenge thing in the first place. The reality is that racism and gender stereotypes, wholly apart from being sometimes conscious and deliberate, are fairly invasive. Someone can look at two entirely similar people/jurors and while one of them -- the white/majority/male one -- might seem "fine, even though a bit overly confident for my own tastes," it's distinctly possible for that same person to view a quite-similarly-situated minority/female juror (or person) as "aggressive" or "uppity" or "hostile". That's not saying that you go into voir dire with an intent or desire to bounce all the minority jurors. But to pretend that racism and stereotypes don't play a role in some of the assessments we might make about individual people is, I think, a fair piece naive. It's not the way things necessarily work -- either in academic theory or in practice.
Anyway, they shouldn't have bounced that fifth person. New trial with a more representative jury (hopefully).
