Abstract
This paper examines the impact of jury racial composition on trial outcomes using a unique data set of felony trials in Florida between 2000 and 2010. We utilize a research design that exploits day-to-day variation in the composition of the jury pool to isolate quasi-random variation in the composition of the seated jury, finding evidence that: (i) juries formed from all-white jury pools convict black defendants significantly (16 percentage points) more often than white defendants and (ii) this gap in conviction rates is entirely eliminated when the jury pool includes at least one black member. The impact of jury race is much greater than what a simple correlation of the race of the seated jury and conviction rates would suggest. These findings imply that the application of justice is highly uneven and raise obvious concerns about the fairness of trials in jurisdictions with a small proportion of blacks in the jury pool.
Highlights
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S Constitution establishes the right of a defendant charged with a crime to a trial by an impartial jury.1 Yet the history of American criminal justice is replete with cases where the abstract promise of jury impartiality has been called into question
We examine how conviction rates for white and black defendants vary with the composition of the jury pool rather than the seated jury
The Effect of the Racial Composition of the Jury Pool on Conviction Rates we examine the impact of the racial composition of the jury pool on conviction rates for white and black defendants
Summary
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 September 2010. The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials Shamena Anwar, Patrick Bayer, and Randi Hjalmarsson NBER Working Paper No 16366 September 2010, Revised September 2011 JEL No H1,J71,K0,K14,K40,K41
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