under Cal.Penal Code § 273.5(a) (West 1999). During jury selection, Johnson made a motion objecting to the prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges to remove two male jurors. Johnson’s motion was made pursuant to People v. Wheeler, 22 Cal.3d 258, 148 Cal.Rptr. 890, 583 P.2d 748 (Ca.1978), the California state case procedurally analogous to Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986). The trial court rejected the Wheeler motion. The state court of appeal affirmed, and the Supreme Court of California denied a petition for review. In April 2003, Johnson filed his § 2254 petition for habeas corpus in federal court, again arguing that the prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges violated the Equal Protection Clause. See Batson, 476 U.S. at 84, 106 S.Ct. 1712 (<HOLDING>); J.E.B. v. Alabama, 511 U.S. 127, 130-31, 114
holding that courts must entertain a challenge to a private litigants racially discriminatory use of peremptory challenges in a civil trial holding that the fourteenth amendment protects every person against purely racially motivated exercise of peremptory challenges holding that racially discriminatory use of peremptory challenges violates the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment holding that is not the fact that a jury is all white or all black that violates batson rather it is the racially discriminatory use of peremptory challenges to strike jurors holding that state court enforcement of racially restrictive covenants constituted state action in violation of the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment