Justice Elena Kagan called it “the best smoking-gun evidence you’re ever going to see about race bias in the jury room.”

Now she and her colleagues on the Supreme Court will need to decide whether it is a good enough reason to allow a Hispanic defendant to challenge the long-standing principle of secrecy in jury deliberations.

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Peña Rodriguez was challenging federal rules and those employed in Colorado and elsewhere that forbid challenging statements made during jury deliberations. But his attorney, Stanford law professor Jeffrey L. Fisher, said those rules must give way if there is an allegation of racial discrimination.

“This is a principle that goes quite a ways back in the court’s jurisprudence, which is the perception of fairness when it comes to racial bias and racial discrimination is paramount,” Fisher said. He said 18 states already allow such investigation.

Fisher found support among the court’s liberals but was immediately questioned by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. about where he would draw the line.

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Fisher said he was only advocating that racial remarks be covered. But Alito said that was avoiding the inevitable.

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But Fisher said that those would be questions for another day and that the court often identifies racial discrimination as the first “evil” to try to eradicate.