1. Whether, as the overwhelming majority of jurisdictions hold, a request for self-representation under Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806 (1975), is timely if made prior to trial, or whether instead—as California and a handful of other jurisdictions maintain—even a pretrial Faretta request can be held to be "untimely" based on an amorphous "totality of the circumstances" test?

2. Has California continued to defy this Court's holding and opinion in Johnson v. California, 545 U.S. 162 (2005), by consistently imposing a standard for the first (or prima facie) step of the analysis required by this Court's opinion in Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), that is, as a practical matter, impossible to satisfy?

Whether a pretrial request for self-representation can be held 'untimely'