In Gray v. Mississippi (1987) 481 U.S. 648, the prosecution was forced to use several of its peremptory challenges to remove jurors opposed to the death penalty who the trial court should have excused for cause under Witherspoon v. Illinois. After the prosecution had used all its challenges, the court, in an apparent attempt to correct the earlier error, excused a potential juror for cause who was, in fact, qualified to serve. The defendant challenged the erroneous excusal of this last juror. The court reaffirmed its earlier ruling in Davis v. Georgia (1976) 429 U.S. 122, in which it established a per se rule that a death sentence must be vacated for Witherspoon error. (481 U.S. at pp. 667-668.) In reaching this result, the court discussed and rejected two rationales sometimes advanced in favor of applying harmless error analysis to Witherspoon error. The first argued the error was harmless if the prosecution still had an unexercised peremptory challenge at the end of jury selection that it assertedly would have used to exclude the Witherspoon juror if the court had not. (Gray v. Mississippi, supra, 481 U.S. at p. 664.) The court said: "The unexercised peremptory argument assumes that the crucial question in the harmless-error analysis is whether a particular prospective juror is excluded from the jury due to the trial court's erroneous ruling. Rather, the relevant inquiry is 'whether the composition of the jury panel as a whole could possibly have been affected by the trial court's error.'" (Id. at pp. 664-665.) It went on to explain that, had the trial court not committed Witherspoon error in the first place, the prosecution might have used its peremptory challenges differently, such that there was no way to know whether it would still have had an unexercised challenge left to use at the end of jury selection. Therefore, the court concluded "the nature of the jury selection process defies any attempt to establish that an erroneous Witherspoon-Witt exclusion of a juror is harmless." (Ibid.) For similar reasons, the court also rejected the second rationale, which argued an erroneous Witherspoon exclusion is harmless if the jury ultimately selected nevertheless fairly represented the community. ( Id. at pp. 666-668.)