Miller-El v. Dretke, 545 U.S. 231 (2005), is a United States Supreme Court case that clarified the constitutional limitations on the use by prosecutors of peremptory challenges and of the Texas procedure termed the "jury shuffle."

Background

Thomas Miller-El was charged with capital murder committed in the course of a robbery. After voir dire, Miller-El moved to strike the entire jury because the prosecution had used its peremptory challenges to strike ten of the eleven African-Americans who were eligible to serve on the jury. This motion was denied, and Miller-El was subsequently found guilty and sentenced to death.

Opinion of the Court

In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that a prosecutor's use of peremptory challenges may not be used to exclude jurors on the basis of race. Miller-El appealed based on the Batson criteria and asked that his conviction be overturned. In June 2005, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to overturn Miller-El's death sentence, finding his jury selection process had been tainted by racial bias. The Court had held in Batson that a defendant could rely on "all relevant circumstances" in making out a prima facie case of purposeful discrimination. Miller-El clarified that "all relevant circumstances" included evidence outside "the four corners of the case." Specifically, the Court allowed statistical analysis of the venire, side-by-side comparison of struck and empaneled jurors, disparate questioning, and evidence of historical discrimination. In 2008, Miller-El pleaded guilty to the 1985 murder of Douglas Walker, a Holiday Inn clerk who had been bound, gagged, then shot to death. The murder of Walker was the crime that Miller-El was originally sent to death row for. The Court extended the holding of Miller-El in Snyder v. Louisiana.