Justice Ginsburg was back on the Supreme Court bench after her cancer surgery, and she was in fine form. The attorney for street gang hitman Michael Rivera had barely opened his mouth before she was grilling him. "It -- it seems quite a stretch to apply those decisions [on biased judges] to -- to the case of a juror who was qualified, and it was just a judge who was overexuberant in denying a peremptory challenge." Transcript here.

It's not a good sign for the defendant when most of your argument is taken up with hardball questions from Justices Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer and the only softball you get is from Justice Scalia. It's also not good when Justice Kennedy asks opposing amicus counsel, "There are any number of alternatives that we can adopt in ruling for your position. If we were to rule for your position, what do you think is the most straightforward rationale?"

This case will probably be decided on the grounds of when the Supreme Court can review a state decision on a reverse-Batson ruling, where the trial judge has denied a defense peremptory challenge on the ground of race or sex bias. Such a decision may have some application to habeas, but it is not likely to tell us much about how Batson rulings are reviewed in the normal course of appeals, as we had hoped.