Peremptory challenges enable litigants to remove otherwise qualified prospective jurors from the jury panel without any showing of cause, and accordingly, are often exercised on the basis of race. In Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court tried to remedy the most obvious abuses by requiring that strike proponents give a "race neutral" reason for their strikes and directing trial courts to assess the credibility of the explanation. But the Batson regime has proved spectacularly unsuccessful. It has not ended racial discrimination in jury selection, nor does it adequately safeguard the rights of the excluded jurors. One of the reasons for this failure is that the Batson framework rests on psychologically naive theories of human behavior. These are that (1) considerations of race can be purged from the jury selection process, (2) lawyers will be aware of their motivations for striking particular jurors and will report these reasons honestly, and (3) judges will be able to distinguish between honest and dishonest explanations. But these theories are inconsistent with recent advances in cognitive psychology, which suggest instead that most of us retain implicit biases against racial minorities, even when we believe that we are unbiased.