Alonzo Johnson v. Claude Finn

Alonzo Deon Johnson and Darrell Thompson, California state prisoners, challenge the prosecution’s use of peremptory strikes to exclude black jurors in their trial. A magistrate judge, after holding an evidentiary hearing at which the prosecutor testified, found that he had purposefully discriminated on the basis of race in exercising a peremptory strike against one of the black jurors. The district judge, without holding a new evidentiary hearing, rejected the magistrate judge’s finding as to the prosecutor’s lack of credibility in asserting race-neutral reasons for having stricken the juror. In doing so, the district judge denied Johnson and Thompson the process that they were constitutionally due.

We hold that the rule of United States v. Ridgway, 300 F.3d 1153 (9th Cir.2002), extends to determinations by a magistrate judge as to the credibility of a prosecutor’s testimony at the second and third steps of the inquiry required by Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 , 106 S.Ct. 1712 , 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986). In Ridgway, we held that the Due Process Clause required “that a district court ... conduct its own evidentiary hearing before rejecting a magistrate judge’s credibility…