Cite as: 528 U. S. 304 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 24(c). The question to which we now turn is whether Martinez-Salazar was denied any right for which Rule 24 provides.
III
Our most recent decision in point is Ross v. Oklahoma. That 1988 decision dealt with a question resembling the one presented here, although the issue in Ross arose in a state-law setting. The defendant in Ross exercised a peremptory challenge to cure the trial court's error in denying a challenge for cause. We first rejected, as the Ninth Circuit rightly did in the decision under review, the position that, without more, "the loss of a peremptory challenge constitutes a violation of the constitutional right to an impartial jury." 487 U. S., at 88. "So long as the jury that sits is impartial," we held, "the fact that the defendant had to use a peremptory challenge to achieve that result does not mean the Sixth Amendment was violated." Ibid. We then took up the defendant's due process objection. He argued that forced use of a peremptory challenge to cure a trial court's error in denying a challenge for cause "arbitrarily depriv[ed] him of the full complement of . . . peremptory challenges allowed under Oklahoma law." Id., at 89. An Oklahoma statute accorded the defendant nine peremptory challenges. Oklahoma courts had read into that grant a requirement that "a defendant who disagrees with the trial court's ruling on a for-cause challenge must, in order to preserve the claim that the ruling deprived him of a fair trial, exercise a peremptory challenge to remove the juror." Ibid. Even then, under Oklahoma law, "the error [was] grounds for reversal only if the defendant exhaust[ed] all peremptory challenges and an incompetent juror [was] forced upon him." Ibid. The defendant in Ross, we therefore concluded, did not lose any right conferred by state law when he used one of his nine challenges to remove a juror who should have been excused for cause. Because the defendant received all that state law allowed him, and the fair trial that the Federal Constitution
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