It is no secret that our criminal justice system targets black people disproportionately at every stage—more stops, more arrests, more serious charges, longer sentences. On Monday, the Supreme Court will face one facet of that system: juror selection.

Prosecutors frequently strike black jurors—especially when the defendant is black, and especially when the victim is white—because all-white juries are more likely to convict. This is, of course, unconstitutional, but the problem, as with many stages of the criminal process, is that it’s hard to prove that any one prosecutor acted because of race. Monday’s case, Foster v. Chatman, involves such a blatant effort to strike black jurors that, on the narrow issue of whether Timothy Foster should get a new trial, the case should be easy to decide. The real question is whether the Court takes on the bigger issue: the ease with which prosecutors can curate an all-white jury under current law.

Before a trial begins, judges and lawyers take a large pool of potential jurors and trim it down to a twelve-person jury. There are two ways jurors get cut. First, the judge removes potential jurors who have an obvious stake in the outcome of the case—either because they are connected to the defendant, or because they have preconceptions about the case. Next, the prosecution and defense each get to strike a certain number of jurors for any reason at all, on a hunch that the juror will not be sympathetic to their case. These are called “peremptory strikes.”

Peremptory strikes, which generally require no explanation, have long served as a means for excluding black citizens from juries. In a 1986 case called Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors could not use such strikes to remove jurors based on their race. Doing so violates the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified after the Civil War to ban racial discrimination, among other things. When a defendant alleges that a peremptory strike was racially motivated, in what is known as a “Batson challenge,” prosecutors must convince the judge that they struck the juror for race-neutral reasons. In practice, judges validate all but the most egregious strikes.

Foster v. Chatman, the case before the Court, is one of those egregious cases. The defendant, Timothy Foster, who is black, stood accused of capital murder. Before trial, the prosecutor struck all four prospective black jurors. This happens all the time, but what makes the case unusual is the paper trail left by prosecutors and discovered by the defense.