346
Opinion of the Court
We agree with petitioner that the prosecution's decision to seek a jury shuffle when a predominant number of African-Americans were seated in the front of the panel, along with its decision to delay a formal objection to the defense's shuffle until after the new racial composition was revealed, raise a suspicion that the State sought to exclude African-Americans from the jury. Our concerns are amplified by the fact that the state court also had before it, and apparently ignored, testimony demonstrating that the Dallas County District Attorney's Office had, by its own admission, used this process to manipulate the racial composition of the jury in the past. App. 788 (noting that a prosecutor admitted to requesting a jury shuffle "because a predominant number of the first six, eight or ten jurors were blacks"). Even though the practice of jury shuffling might not be denominated as a Batson claim because it does not involve a peremptory challenge, the use of the practice here tends to erode the credibility of the prosecution's assertion that race was not a motivating factor in the jury selection.
Finally, in our threshold examination, we accord some weight to petitioner's historical evidence of racial discrimination by the District Attorney's Office. Evidence presented at the Swain hearing indicates that African-Americans almost categorically were excluded from jury service. Batson, supra, at 94 ("Proof of systematic exclusion from the venire raises an inference of purposeful discrimination because the 'result bespeaks discrimination' "); Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U. S. 254, 259 (1986) ("As early as 1942, this Court rejected a contention that absence of blacks on the grand jury was insufficient to support an inference of discrimination, summarily asserting that 'chance or accident could hardly have accounted for the continuous omission of negroes from the grand jury lists for so long a period as sixteen years or more' " (quoting Hill v. Texas, 316 U. S. 400, 404 (1942))); Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U. S. 475, 482 (1954) ("But it taxes our credulity to say that mere chance resulted in there being
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