Wade

California state prisoners Daniel Adam Wade and Paul Christopher Buckley (“petitioners”) appeal the district court’s denial of their petitions for habeas corpus, in which they challenge their convictions for multiple counts of assault upon a police officer with a firearm. Petitioners assert that the prosecutor in their joint criminal trial exercised a peremptory challenge to exclude an African-American from the jury in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and that the state trial court erred in finding that petitioners had not established a prima facie case of discrimination under Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 , 106 S.Ct. 1712 , 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986).

Evaluation of allegedly discriminatory peremptory challenges to potential jurors in federal and state trials is governed by the standard established by the United States Supreme Court in Batson . However, California courts evaluate such challenges, as they have done in this case, under the pre-Batson standard established by the California Supreme Court in People v. Wheeler, 22 Cal.3d 258 , 148 Cal.Rptr. 890 , 583 P.2d 748 (1978). We hold that the Wheeler standard,…