[00:00:00] Speaker 00:
The next case on our document, well, my here on this versus Merrick Garland has been submitted on the briefs.

[00:00:07] Speaker 00:
Uh, the case of Martico Muldrow versus attorney general from the state of Arizona.

[00:00:13] Speaker 00:
Um, Ryan Thornhill has also been submitted on the briefs.

[00:00:18] Speaker 00:
So the next case for oral argument is Eric Wright versus, uh, Kristen Mays.

[00:00:30] Speaker 00:
It should be noted on the day sheet, it says Mark Brinovich, but I think it should be changed to Chris Mase.

[00:00:37] Speaker 00:
Is that correct?

[00:00:39] Speaker 00:
Is that the current attorney general?

[00:00:41] Speaker 03:
Yes.

[00:00:42] Speaker 03:
Yes, your honor.

[00:00:44] Speaker 00:
So you may proceed.

[00:00:49] Speaker 04:
Thank you, your honor.

[00:00:50] Speaker 04:
May it please the court.

[00:00:52] Speaker 04:
I am Daniel Kaplan.

[00:00:53] Speaker 04:
I represent the appellant, Eric Wright.

[00:00:55] Speaker 04:
I will watch the clock and attempt to save about two minutes from my rebuttal.

[00:01:01] Speaker 04:
In Mr. Wright's state court trial for unlawful drug possession, the prosecutor used a peremptory strike to remove Mr. Wright's one chance of seeing a fellow African-American sitting on his jury.

[00:01:15] Speaker 04:
When trial defense counsel raised the Batson challenge, the prosecutor gave two reasons to race neutral reasons for that strike.

[00:01:24] Speaker 04:
The first was a reason that applied also to a white male prospective juror, number one, who was not questioned by the prosecutor and not struck and served on the jury.

[00:01:35] Speaker 04:
The second reason was one that was so inscrutable and unclear that the state has struggled through the course of this case to try to explain what he meant.

[00:01:46] Speaker 04:
The trial judge nevertheless summarily denied the Batson objection.

[00:01:50] Speaker 04:
The Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed that denial.

[00:01:53] Speaker 04:
and Mr. Wright is seeking relief through a habeas corpus.

[00:01:57] Speaker 04:
The District Court in the habeas case applied deference under EDPA and found that the Court of Appeals decision was not unreasonable.

[00:02:05] Speaker 04:
The District Court erred in applying EDPA deference and it erred in finding the decision was not unreasonable, even if EDPA deference applies.

[00:02:14] Speaker 00:
Mr. Kaplan, your time is limited here.

[00:02:18] Speaker 00:
Why should we conclude that the Arizona Court of Appeals

[00:02:22] Speaker 00:
failed to adjudicate this case or his claim on the merits.

[00:02:28] Speaker 04:
Because the Court of Appeals misrepresented or recast his substantive Batson argument, which is the argument at step three of Batson that the reason given by the prosecutor was pretextual, recast that as an argument that the prosecutor failed at step two of Batson to articulate a race-neutral reason.

[00:02:49] Speaker 00:
Why does that matter?

[00:02:50] Speaker 04:
Well, it matters because there's a body of case law, cases like Tarango and Echeverria and Brewster that I've cited in my reply brief that say when a state court is clear about its rationale and the explanation it gives shows that it didn't reach a certain issue, then the habeas court will take the state court at its word.

[00:03:14] Speaker 04:
when the analysis shows they didn't reach the key issue, the actual argument, it's clear they didn't adjudicate that on the merits under it.

[00:03:21] Speaker 00:
Well, isn't it clear that they adjudicated the claim?

[00:03:25] Speaker 00:
I know arguments are different from claims, so isn't it clear that they adjudicated the claim on the Arizona Court of Appeals?

[00:03:33] Speaker 00:
I mean, they spent two pages talking about that claim, I believe, and just trying to figure out what's your best case

[00:03:44] Speaker 00:
for dissecting, it seems like the argument from the claim is you're doing here.

[00:03:53] Speaker 04:
I would say my best case for this particular issue is Whedon versus Johnson, which is cited in my opening brief.

[00:03:59] Speaker 04:
And that's a case where there was a Strickland claim and the state court acknowledged that the Ninth Circuit noted that the state court acknowledged the prejudice part of Strickland.

[00:04:11] Speaker 04:
but still said you can look at what they said about Strickland and it's clear they didn't reach the prejudice prong, therefore prejudice under Strickland was not adjudicated on the merits.

[00:04:21] Speaker 04:
And they also pointed out that even if you could say the state court did reach the Strickland prejudice, the legal analysis they applied was clearly wrong under Supreme Court precedent.

[00:04:31] Speaker 04:
So it's really two sides of the same coin.

[00:04:33] Speaker 04:
If you could say the state court of appeals here adjudicated the step three Batson issue, they clearly applied the wrong legal standard because

[00:04:41] Speaker 04:
articulating or facially race neutral reason is not what satisfies step three of bats and that's clear to everyone.

[00:04:47] Speaker 00:
It seems like in Whedon though there was some error or specter of speculation.

[00:04:54] Speaker 00:
Here I don't think it's mere speculation that the Arizona Court of Appeals discussed the third bats and prongs and nor is there any contention that the Arizona Court of Appeals applied

[00:05:09] Speaker 00:
the wrong legal standard, at least from my review, and I wanted to give you ample opportunity to... I'll respectfully dispute what you just said.

[00:05:17] Speaker 04:
I 100% argue that they did not apply the right legal standard.

[00:05:21] Speaker 04:
They applied the wrong legal standard.

[00:05:23] Speaker 04:
They applied the step two Batson legal standard to a step three claim.

[00:05:27] Speaker 04:
But I'm happy to turn to assuming Edpo applies.

[00:05:30] Speaker 04:
Assuming Edpo applies, it still was an unreasonable determination.

[00:05:34] Speaker 04:
The first reason the prosecutor gave was

[00:05:37] Speaker 04:
And these were the words he used, African-American Juror 43, returned a not guilty verdict in a criminal case.

[00:05:44] Speaker 04:
Those were the words, not fully acquitted, returned a not guilty verdict.

[00:05:48] Speaker 04:
And it's undisputed here that what Juror 1 said about his prior jury service, although it wasn't crystal clear, indicates one, at least one, not guilty verdict.

[00:05:58] Speaker 02:
You know, we get a lot of bats in litigation, both on direct appeal and through habeas.

[00:06:06] Speaker 02:
And sometimes you get the impression that prosecutors come to bets and challenges with a book of acceptable, non-pretextual reasons for having exercised a peremptory strike.

[00:06:21] Speaker 02:
Here, it was exercised because the person had been sat on a jury and returned a not guilty verdict.

[00:06:30] Speaker 02:
What is pretextual about that?

[00:06:33] Speaker 04:
The fact that he had no concern about white male juror one who returned a not guilty verdict.

[00:06:39] Speaker 04:
That's the main problem with that.

[00:06:41] Speaker 00:
Wasn't juror number one somewhat distinguishable from juror 43?

[00:06:50] Speaker 04:
Well, not in the reason that the prosecutor gave.

[00:06:55] Speaker 04:
The reason the prosecutor gave was returned a not guilty verdict, and he's exactly the same as far as that.

[00:07:00] Speaker 04:
And it's only what the prosecutor said

[00:07:02] Speaker 04:
that matters.

[00:07:03] Speaker 04:
Projecting back and trying to come up with better and different rationales for the prosecutor of the Supreme Court and Miller-El has made clear that's not how we do that.

[00:07:12] Speaker 03:
Mr. Kaplan, when we're talking about whether the reason was pretextual and we're deferring first to the district court and then we're doing so under the section two

[00:07:28] Speaker 03:
unreasonable determination of the facts as double layers of deference, why wouldn't we give the benefit of the doubt to the people who are in the courtroom observing the prosecutor's explanation for pretext?

[00:07:40] Speaker 04:
If the trial court has said, I'm making a judgment based upon the prosecutor's demeanor or the prosecutor has said something about juror one's demeanor and I am crediting that, that would be a different story.

[00:07:54] Speaker 04:
In Snyder versus Louisiana, the Supreme Court said,

[00:07:57] Speaker 04:
you can't just come up with demeanor as, you know, the justification for a Batson challenge after the fact if there's no finding on the record.

[00:08:06] Speaker 04:
So as a general matter, when things like demeanor and things that happen in the courtroom are cited and on the record as a justification, there's a certain amount of deference that would apply here.

[00:08:17] Speaker 04:
It was just a simple fact.

[00:08:18] Speaker 04:
He said this one, this African-American

[00:08:22] Speaker 04:
potential juror return to not guilty verdict in a criminal case, we can look at the record and see a white male juror did the same thing.

[00:08:28] Speaker 04:
And not only was he not struck, he didn't ask a single question.

[00:08:31] Speaker 03:
But that is a fact.

[00:08:33] Speaker 03:
It may be simple or otherwise.

[00:08:34] Speaker 03:
It is a fact reviewable for clear error in the district, in the trial court.

[00:08:39] Speaker 03:
The finding of pretext, is that not?

[00:08:44] Speaker 04:
Yes, it's considered a factual finding.

[00:08:46] Speaker 04:
But the factual finding is clearly erroneous and affirming it as unreasonable when the record

[00:08:52] Speaker 04:
It clearly shows that it was a rationale that applied equally to a white male, non-struck, non-questioned juror.

[00:08:59] Speaker 00:
Well, but let's go back, because in this case, the judge did a lot of the questioning initially, I believe.

[00:09:05] Speaker 00:
And then, so it wasn't the prosecutor who elicited that response or

[00:09:15] Speaker 00:
If I recall correctly, and you correct me if I'm not recalling it correctly, but I think fundamentally what might be different here is that juror number one, was he sufficiently analogous to juror 43 for the comparative juror analysis to take place?

[00:09:33] Speaker 00:
Because it looks like regarding juror number one, he had a split verdict in the trial that he had.

[00:09:43] Speaker 00:
There was a guilt.

[00:09:44] Speaker 00:
had served on a prior jury that involved a murder.

[00:09:48] Speaker 00:
And when the trial judge asked about the Berger one indicated that the murder was guilty and the salt was split because of salt and and that battery and then.

[00:10:03] Speaker 00:
There's you know some different contentions I guess on what your one could have met but.

[00:10:10] Speaker 00:
But

[00:10:10] Speaker 00:
In any case, a split verdict is different from a not guilty verdict, isn't it?

[00:10:16] Speaker 04:
Again, I have to respectfully disagree.

[00:10:17] Speaker 04:
A split verdict when there's multiple charges means there's a not guilty and there's a guilty.

[00:10:22] Speaker 04:
And returning a not guilty verdict is the justification the prosecutor gave.

[00:10:26] Speaker 04:
I would like to save a little bit of my time if I could for robustness.

[00:10:29] Speaker 00:
Yeah, I'll give you a little bit of time.

[00:10:30] Speaker 04:
Thank you.

[00:10:31] Speaker ?:
Sure.

[00:10:45] Speaker 01:
May it please the court, Eliza Ibera, representing Chris Mays and respondents.

[00:10:52] Speaker 01:
Federal habeas courts reviewing state court decisions have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

[00:10:59] Speaker 01:
The state court decision has to be not merely wrong, but actually unreasonable for a right to prevail here.

[00:11:08] Speaker 01:
If reasonable minds reviewing the record could disagree about whether the prosecutor was secretly motivated by race, then that's not enough under Ed Pez's doubly deferential standard of review.

[00:11:21] Speaker 01:
And most of Wright's arguments are a little bit

[00:11:26] Speaker 01:
I guess speculative, in the sense that they involve like, well, how many questions were asked to this juror or that juror, except for one of them, the comparison between juror 27, or excuse me, juror 1, and juror 43.

[00:11:43] Speaker 01:
But it's not surprising that juror 43, the black juror, was asked more questions by the prosecutor, because juror 43 was the only juror

[00:11:54] Speaker 01:
on the entire jury who'd served on three prior juries.

[00:11:59] Speaker 01:
And I went through the transcript to make sure that was right.

[00:12:02] Speaker 01:
And juror three served on three trials.

[00:12:06] Speaker 01:
And if you're the prosecutor and you're looking at this, you want your fair and impartial jury.

[00:12:12] Speaker 01:
And you also want a jury that's going to be receptive to your case.

[00:12:17] Speaker 01:
And so when you hear that one of the jurors has sat on three prior juries, you think, OK, this might be the foreman for my case.

[00:12:26] Speaker 01:
And you're naturally more curious about what happened in these prior juries.

[00:12:32] Speaker 00:
And in fact, when you look at what you're offering thoughts now that the prosecutor didn't offer at the time,

[00:12:40] Speaker 01:
Well, if you actually go back and look at the way the prosecutor questioned Juror 43, he actually asked him if he'd been a foreman before.

[00:12:49] Speaker 01:
That was for the first DUI conviction.

[00:12:53] Speaker 01:
And then when Juror 43 goes into his explanation, first of all, all three of these cases were within the last eight years.

[00:13:05] Speaker 01:
So it's not like they were a long time ago.

[00:13:07] Speaker 01:
But then the prosecutor asks him about the acquittal.

[00:13:10] Speaker 01:
And Juror 43 says, the acquittal was, I don't know how you would characterize it.

[00:13:16] Speaker 01:
He was speeding, ran into a car, someone died.

[00:13:20] Speaker 01:
So the prosecutor knows, serious case involving death, I want to know more about this.

[00:13:27] Speaker 01:
And the prosecutor says, and you guys ended up finding him not guilty.

[00:13:32] Speaker 01:
And he says, the person made a left turn and he ran into, the person that was speeding ran into someone making a left hand turn.

[00:13:39] Speaker 01:
And the prosecutor wants to make sure this is really the acquittal because when you listen to that explanation, it doesn't really explain why they acquitted.

[00:13:50] Speaker 01:
It wasn't like, well,

[00:13:52] Speaker 01:
the state failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt or something that would be understandable, it was this strange statement that the person made a left turn and he ran into the person that was speeding, ran into someone making a left-hand turn.

[00:14:06] Speaker 01:
So then the prosecutor says, criminal case, to make sure that he's not confused with the civil case that Juror 43 served on.

[00:14:14] Speaker 01:
And then Juror 43 says yes, and then they go on to discuss the civil case.

[00:14:20] Speaker 00:
I understand that.

[00:14:22] Speaker 00:
I guess the only point I was making is even though he asked about whether or not he'd been former, he didn't state that, did he?

[00:14:28] Speaker 00:
When he said no, that's correct.

[00:14:30] Speaker 00:
All right.

[00:14:31] Speaker 00:
Uh, so let's just go over some of the, the, the, the basic, um, main question here that I have for you.

[00:14:38] Speaker 00:
Um, and that is, um, was the court of appeals, did they adjudicate on the merits?

[00:14:46] Speaker 01:
Yes.

[00:14:47] Speaker 00:
Tell me why, despite the argument by the appellant that the claim was misstated.

[00:14:55] Speaker 01:
OK, well, there are four reasons.

[00:14:59] Speaker 01:
First of all, both of the parties briefed the claim, and they had separate subject headings for this claim.

[00:15:06] Speaker 01:
And then when the Court of Appeals summarizes the claims,

[00:15:13] Speaker 01:
And let me back up before I get into this and say that just because the Court of Appeals addresses prong two of Batson doesn't mean that it's ignoring prong three of Batson.

[00:15:26] Speaker 01:
And that's really clear if you look at paragraph nine when the court says,

[00:15:32] Speaker 01:
Defendant argues that this explanation was inconsistent with other challenges the prosecutor made to the prospective jury.

[00:15:38] Speaker 01:
That's a statement that really only applies to a pretextual claim.

[00:15:43] Speaker 01:
And then if you look at the concluding paragraph, the court summarizes what the trial court did, and then it says we find no error.

[00:15:52] Speaker 01:
And this is what it is exactly.

[00:15:54] Speaker 01:
By denying defendants' challenge, the court

[00:15:57] Speaker 01:
implicitly found that defendant failed to establish the state's reason was a pretext for purposeful discrimination.

[00:16:04] Speaker 01:
We find no error.

[00:16:06] Speaker 03:
Ms.

[00:16:06] Speaker 03:
Vera, to look at the, let's look at the paragraph in between where the court is actually thinks, says at least that it's speaking to the third prong of the, of the challenge.

[00:16:17] Speaker 03:
Um, is that a, is that when, when the court says it's dealing with prong three, is it actually addressing prong three on the merits?

[00:16:27] Speaker 01:
I think it's addressing two aspects of prong three, because Wright had raised two arguments.

[00:16:34] Speaker 01:
He said first you have to, he thought that the trial court had to make explicit findings about why it found the prosecutor more credible.

[00:16:42] Speaker 01:
And so when the court of appeals is addressing prong three under the third stage, I think maybe you're talking about paragraph 10.

[00:16:50] Speaker 03:
Yes.

[00:16:51] Speaker 01:
Under the third stage, the analysis is fact intensive and turns on the credibility of the prosecutor.

[00:16:58] Speaker 01:
They're discussing why the trial court, why there's no law that requires the trial court to explain its finding.

[00:17:06] Speaker 01:
And then also at the very end, they say that the

[00:17:12] Speaker 01:
trial court implicitly found that he failed to establish pretext and that they found no error by that.

[00:17:18] Speaker 01:
And the state courts are really not required to write their decision in any particular way.

[00:17:24] Speaker 01:
So, I mean, it may be that if any of you had sat on that panel

[00:17:28] Speaker 01:
At the Court of Appeals, it would have been a much more detailed analysis.

[00:17:32] Speaker 03:
Well, to receive EDPA deference, they are required to write it in a way that allows us to determine whether they'd address the claim on the merits.

[00:17:39] Speaker 01:
Of course.

[00:17:41] Speaker 01:
But there's actually two other reasons why you know that they addressed it on the merits.

[00:17:46] Speaker 01:
Whether or not we like how exhaustive their reasoning was is not the same thing as saying that they didn't address it.

[00:17:53] Speaker 01:
I think they clearly addressed it here.

[00:17:56] Speaker 01:
But then the second or I guess the third reason you have the party's briefing, then you have the way the decision is written.

[00:18:03] Speaker 01:
The third reason is that he admitted that they addressed it in his petition for review to the Arizona Supreme Court, and also he did not move for reconsideration of the Court of Appeals decision, which you would really think he would have done if he had thought that they missed a claim.

[00:18:20] Speaker 01:
And in his petition for review, he said, the Court of Appeals was willing to find

[00:18:24] Speaker 01:
The trial court's denial of petitioners' bats and challenge was an implicit determination that the state's explanation was not a pretext for purposeful discrimination.

[00:18:33] Speaker 01:
And I mean, to be clear, he does say in his petition, I think they should have put more analysis into this.

[00:18:40] Speaker 01:
But while he's saying that, he also admits that they did adjudicate it on the merits.

[00:18:46] Speaker 01:
And then the fourth reason is actually the case law.

[00:18:50] Speaker 01:
there's a rebuttable presumption in habeas that even if the state court didn't address this at all, unless there's something in the state court decision to suggest that it's affirmatively not reaching this claim, when a state court addresses some but not all of the arguments that are raised, under Johnson versus Willis, there's a rebuttable presumption that they did resolve it on the merits.

[00:19:19] Speaker 01:
And I'd like to address a couple of the cases that opposing counsel mentioned.

[00:19:26] Speaker 01:
The first one is Echeveria, and it's a Ninth Circuit case.

[00:19:30] Speaker 01:
And I think it's very distinguishable, because that was a case where the state Supreme Court resolved it based on the law of the case.

[00:19:38] Speaker 01:
So let's say you had claims A and B, and the state Supreme Court said, we're resolving claims A and B based on the law of the case.

[00:19:46] Speaker 01:
The problem was that the earlier decision that the state court was relying on, in that decision the parties had only raised claim A and nobody had ever argued claim B. And so it was really clear that the state court was not addressing claim B. And then I'd also like to address Tarango.

[00:20:09] Speaker 01:
Tarango was kind of just completely different because it was a juror misconduct case and the court found that clearly established federal constitutional law required that if the state court assumed that contact occurred, you had to go on and discuss prejudice.

[00:20:27] Speaker 01:
And in fact, the state court had assumed, they'd affirmatively said, we assume that contact occurred, but there was nothing in the decision about prejudice.

[00:20:37] Speaker 01:
Oh, I see that my time is almost up.

[00:20:40] Speaker 00:
I wanted to ask you a question before your time, uh, before you step back.

[00:20:44] Speaker 00:
And that is, can you just briefly address the comparative juror analysis argument that Mr. Kaplan was making on this?

[00:20:52] Speaker 00:
Tell me what's the difference between a split verdict and a not guilty.

[00:20:57] Speaker 01:
Okay.

[00:20:58] Speaker 01:
Um, well, if the prosecutor's listening for

[00:21:02] Speaker 01:
acquittal, not guilty, they're not going to hear it.

[00:21:05] Speaker 01:
In fact, what they're going to hear is, I convicted on a murder.

[00:21:09] Speaker 01:
So the prosecutor is like, oh great, convicted on a murder.

[00:21:14] Speaker 01:
And when you compare that to juror 43, he acquitted on a serious case involving death.

[00:21:19] Speaker 01:
And then when the juror says, the assault was split because assault and that battery, I didn't realize it's two separate things, you don't hear

[00:21:31] Speaker 01:
Not guilty.

[00:21:32] Speaker 01:
You don't hear acquitted.

[00:21:34] Speaker 01:
All that you hear is this confusing, ambiguous statement that might mean, now that we're thinking about this several years later and have had a lot of time to think about it, it's possible that that meant an acquittal.

[00:21:45] Speaker 01:
But there's nothing in the record that would suggest that the prosecutor interpreted it that way.

[00:21:50] Speaker 01:
And they don't need to be omniscient.

[00:21:52] Speaker 01:
They have dozens of jurors to keep track of.

[00:21:56] Speaker 01:
And even if you assume that what that meant was that Juror 1 acquitted in assault or battery, it's totally reasonable for the prosecutor to have thought, well, an acquittal in a case involving death is something I'm really concerned about, especially because Juror 43 served on three prior juries and might be the foreman compared to Juror 1

[00:22:22] Speaker 01:
who convicted in a murder case.

[00:22:25] Speaker 01:
And so that's why we would request that you affirm the district court.

[00:22:30] Speaker 00:
All right.

[00:22:30] Speaker 00:
Thank you very much.

[00:22:35] Speaker 00:
Mr. Captain, I'll give you two minutes.

[00:22:37] Speaker 04:
Thank you, Your Honor.

[00:22:39] Speaker 04:
A few quick points.

[00:22:43] Speaker 04:
As Your Honor has pointed out, the idea of looking back

[00:22:48] Speaker 04:
now and saying, here are some totally reasonable things the prosecutor could have been thinking, like, well, he sat on three prior juries.

[00:22:56] Speaker 04:
Maybe he thought that was significant.

[00:22:58] Speaker 04:
And they all were in the last eight years.

[00:22:59] Speaker 04:
Maybe he thought that was significant.

[00:23:01] Speaker 04:
And the vehicular manslaughter, or similar, was a serious case.

[00:23:06] Speaker 04:
And maybe he thought that was significant.

[00:23:08] Speaker 04:
None of that is the least tiniest bit relevant to the Batson analysis.

[00:23:12] Speaker 04:
Ex-post hypothetical rationales have zero place.

[00:23:15] Speaker 04:
The Supreme Court and Miller-El, in many cases, made that perfectly clear.

[00:23:19] Speaker 04:
And since that's the thrust of the defense of the strike, it shows how indefensible essentially the strike is.

[00:23:26] Speaker 04:
It has also been argued today that the prosecutor asked a bunch of questions to Juror 43 as compared to zero questions to Juror 1, because he must have thought Juror 43's description of juror service was confusing or unclear.

[00:23:44] Speaker 04:
If you accept that logic, Juror 1

[00:23:47] Speaker 04:
must have screamed out for questions more than any other juror by a long stretch.

[00:23:52] Speaker 04:
In fact, if you look at the full record here, the state has never even been clear to itself how many juries Juror 1 sat on.

[00:24:00] Speaker 04:
In the Court of Appeals in Arizona, the state described Juror 1's prior jury service as involving two separate trials, two separate defendants.

[00:24:09] Speaker 04:
Then in the habeas corpus case, the state described it as one trial, all the same defendant,

[00:24:13] Speaker 04:
And then in this court, the state went back to it being two trials with two separate defendants.

[00:24:18] Speaker 04:
So Jura 1, and in fact, this morning here today, the state refers to Jura 1's description of jury service as, quote, confusing, ambiguous.

[00:24:30] Speaker 04:
So if the defense of the differential questioning of 43 and 1 is, well, 43 was kind of unclear, that certainly adds flame, adds firewood to the fire of a clear showing of pretext.

[00:24:43] Speaker 04:
Quickly, in terms of whether it was adjudicated, if you look at the Arizona Court of Appeals decision, what they say is on paragraph eight, they say he's making two claims, no race neutral reason was number one, which is a misstatement, and failure to procedurally undertake the analysis.

[00:25:02] Speaker 04:
And then in paragraphs nine, they address the first claim as they misunderstand it.

[00:25:08] Speaker 04:
Paragraphs 10 and 11, they address the second claim, which is the procedural claim.

[00:25:12] Speaker 04:
So nothing in paragraphs 10 and 11 really constituted a ruling on the merits of the substance of that issue.

[00:25:18] Speaker 04:
Thank you, Your Honor.

[00:25:18] Speaker 02:
It's interesting you folks may be arguing something of a dinosaur since the Arizona Supreme Court has abolished parenterary challenges.

[00:25:26] Speaker 04:
That's very true, Your Honor.

[00:25:28] Speaker 04:
If there are no further questions.

[00:25:30] Speaker 00:
Thank you.

[00:25:32] Speaker 00:
Thank you, Mr. Kaplan and Ms.

[00:25:34] Speaker 00:
Ibera.

[00:25:35] Speaker 00:
The case of Eric Wright versus Kristen Mays is now submitted.