406
Opinion of Thomas, J.
defendant used the venireman's constitutional rights as a means to overturn the defendant's conviction.2
Finally, Powers concluded that there are substantial obstacles to suit by excluded veniremen, including the costs of proceeding individually and the difficulty of establishing a likelihood of recurrence. Id., at 414-415. These obstacles, though perhaps often present in the context of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U. S. 79 (1986), are alone insufficient to justify third-party standing.
Even if the Powers justifications were persuasive, they would still be wholly inapplicable to this case, which involves neither peremptory strikes nor discrimination in the selection of the petit jury. The "injury in fact" allegedly present in Powers is wholly absent from the context at hand. Powers reasoned that repeated peremptory strikes of members of one race constituted an "overt wrong, often apparent to the entire jury panel," that threatened to "cas[t] doubt over the obligation of the parties, the jury, and indeed the court to adhere to the law throughout the trial of the cause." Powers, 499 U. S., at 412. Here, in contrast, the judge selected one member of the grand jury venire to serve as foreman, and the remaining members of the grand jury were selected at random. Even if discriminatory, the judge's selection (rather than exclusion) of a single member of the grand jury could hardly constitute an "overt" wrong that would affect the remainder of the grand jury proceedings, much less the subsequent trial. The Court therefore resorts to emphasizing the seriousness of the allegation of racial discrimination (as though repetition conveys some talismanic power), but that, of course, cannot substitute for injury in fact.
In this case, unlike Powers, petitioner's allegation of injury in fact is not merely unsupported; it is directly foreclosed. There is no allegation in this case that the composition of
2 Of course, the same sense of dismay would arise if the defendant and the excluded venireman were of the same race.
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