In the 1989 case Holland v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury was not violated when prosecutors used peremptory challenges to exclude members of a racial group other than the defendant's own from serving on his or her trial jury. The court held that while it is unconstitutional for prosecutors to use race as a factor in selecting jurors, this principle does not extend to protecting individuals who are not of the same race as the accused. This decision clarified previous rulings which had established that defendants have a constitutional right under both Equal Protection Clause and Sixth Amendment fair cross-section requirement against racially discriminatory selection of their juries but did not specify whether these protections extended beyond one’s own racial group.

In the dissenting opinion for Holland v. Illinois, Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that peremptory challenges based on race violated a defendant's right to an impartial jury under the Sixth Amendment and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. He contended that racial bias could influence jurors' decisions, undermining their impartiality and fairness in evaluating evidence or determining guilt or innocence. Furthermore, he believed that allowing prosecutors to exclude potential jurors based solely on their race perpetuated harmful stereotypes and reinforced societal prejudices against minority groups. This practice also undermined public confidence in the judicial system by suggesting that justice might be influenced by racial considerations rather than legal merits of a case. Therefore, Justice Marshall concluded that any use of peremptory challenges to remove prospective jurors because of their race was unconstitutional.