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Syllabus
jurists would find the district court's assessment of the constitutional claims debatable or wrong, ibid. Pp. 335-338.
(b) Since petitioner's claim rests on a Batson violation, resolution of his COA application requires a preliminary, though not definitive, consideration of the three-step Batson framework. The State now concedes that petitioner satisfied step one, and petitioner acknowledges that the State proceeded through step two by proffering facially race-neutral explanations for these strikes. The critical question in determining whether a prisoner has proved purposeful discrimination at step three is the persuasiveness of the prosecutor's justification for his peremptory strike. E. g., Purkett v. Elem, 514 U. S. 765, 768 (per curiam). The issue comes down to whether the trial court finds the prosecutor's race-neutral explanations to be credible. Credibility can be measured by, among other factors, the prosecutor's demeanor; by how reasonable, or how improbable, the explanations are; and by whether the proffered rationale has some basis in accepted trial strategy. A plurality of this Court has concluded in the direct review context that a state court's finding of the absence of discriminatory intent is "a pure issue of fact" that is accorded significant deference and will not be overturned unless clearly erroneous. Hernandez v. New York, 500 U. S. 352, 364-365. Where 28 U. S. C. § 2254 applies, the Court's habeas jurisprudence embodies this deference. Factual determinations by state courts are presumed correct absent clear and convincing evidence to the contrary, § 2254(e)(1), and a decision adjudicated on the merits in a state court and based on a factual determination will not be overturned on factual grounds unless objectively unreasonable in light of the evidence presented in the state-court proceeding, § 2254(d)(2). Even in the context of federal habeas, deference does not imply abandonment or abdication of judicial review. In the context of the threshold examination in this Batson claim, it can suffice to support the issuance of a COA to adduce evidence demonstrating that, despite the neutral explanation of the prosecution, the peremptory strikes in the final analysis were race based. Cf. Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc., 530 U. S. 133. Pp. 338-341.
(c) On review of the record at this stage, this Court concludes that the District Court did not give full consideration to the substantial evidence petitioner put forth in support of the prima facie case. Instead, it accepted without question the state court's evaluation of the demeanor of the prosecutors and jurors in petitioner's trial. The Fifth Circuit evaluated petitioner's COA application in the same way. In ruling that petitioner's claim lacked sufficient merit to justify appellate proceedings, that court recited the requirements for granting a writ under § 2254,
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