Statistical Aspects of Cases concerning Racial Discrimination in Drug Sentencing: Stephens v. State and U.S. v. Armstrong

Abstract

Statistical evidence has been accepted in a wide variety of legal cases, including trademark confusion,' product liability,2 and jury and employment discrimination.3 Recently, statistics introduced on behalf of defendants who have challenged the fairness of sentencing practices have been poorly received by courts, as compared to their acceptability in equal pay and related fair employment cases. In this article we argue that the usefulness of aggregating the results of many prosecutorial decisions into a statistical analysis may not be adequately appreciated by the legal system. This lack of appreciation may be partially due to the fact that rarely is any data set perfect; one can almost always assert that information about some potentially relevant variable