Cite as: 503 U. S. 562 (1992)
Per Curiam
On April 30, 1986, not long after petitioner filed his brief in the Court of Criminal Appeals, our decision in Batson came down. Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U. S. 79. The case announced the now familiar rule that when a defendant makes a prima facie showing that the State has exercised its peremptory challenges to exclude members of the defendant's racial group, the State bears the burden of coming forward with a race neutral justification. Just over a month after Batson was decided, the State filed its brief in the Court of Criminal Appeals. The State argued Batson could not avail petitioner because he is not a member of the same race as the excluded jurors. According to the State, petitioner's claim could not be considered an equal protection claim but was instead a claim that he was entitled to a jury composed of a "fair cross-section" of the community. Brief for Appellee in No. 69337, pp. 15-17. In drawing this distinction, the State relied on the view that a criminal defendant does not state an equal protection claim unless he alleges that the excluded jurors are members of the same protected class as he. We rejected this view last Term in Powers v. Ohio, 499 U. S. 400 (1991).
The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas, sitting en banc, affirmed petitioner's conviction and sentence on June 12, 1991, and denied petitioner's application for rehearing on September 18, 1991. The opinion of the Court of Criminal Appeals does not set forth the reason for the delay of over five years between the submission of briefs and the resolution of the appeal. With respect to the peremptory challenge question, the court stated that the argument was fore-closed by Holland v. Illinois, 493 U. S. 474 (1990), in which we held that the Sixth Amendment does not prohibit the prosecution from exercising its peremptory challenges to exclude potential jurors based on race. 815 S. W. 2d 592, 598. In a footnote, the Court of Criminal Appeals stated that the arguments in petitioner's brief did not amount to reliance on the Equal Protection Clause. Id., at 598, n. 3. The court's
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