Jury Selection Research Articles

Population Dynamics and Racial and Ethnic Minority Representation in Jury Pools: How Jurisprudence Designed to Reduce Bias can Backfire

Population Dynamics and Racial and Ethnic Minority Representation in Jury Pools: How Jurisprudence Designed to Reduce Bias can Backfire

Xenophobia in Juror Decision-Making

Abstract With the upsurge of anti-globalizing ideologies and politics, the increasing institutionalization of xenophobia within the legal system has emerged as a pressing concern. Existing law and social science research has underexplored xenophobic bias in the US legal system. This article conceptualizes xenophobic bias as consisting of racism and nationalism. It investigates whether mock jurors reach different verdicts on defendant companies from foreign countries of origin (Japan, France, and China) compared to domestic (US) companies. Using a test simulating a patent lawsuit, the research finds no evidence of general xenophobic bias in juror liability verdict decisions, yet there is a specific bias against the Chinese company when granting damage awards. The similarity-leniency effect that has been established in the previous literature is corroborated in this article. Additionally, political views moderate the effects of the company’s country of origin on juror decisions. This research offers a more nuanced conceptual framework of xenophobic bias in juror decision-making for future law and social science research and informs judicial policies seeking to improve jury instructions and jury selection to reduce xenophobic bias.

Survey of change-of-venue motions in appellate court transcripts of murder trials (2000-2020): Which factors make a difference?

A court may move the location of the trial to another jurisdiction if the jury pool is deemed biased by the judge, a legal maneuver based on a "Change of Venue" motion (CoVm). We surveyed the frequency and the factors associated with granting the motion at the state level when the defendant was charged with murder. We reviewed court transcripts of appealed murder convictions during the 2000-2020years from Nexis. We complied a sample of 832 CoVm and conducted a nested regression analysis. We repeated the procedure with a subset of 360 CoVm for which we could identify the race of the defendant and victim. Overall, the success rate of CoVm was 23.5% but varied widely between the states. The motion was more likely to be granted in jurisdictions with smaller populations and a policeman was the victim. It was also found that Black and Latino defendants were less successful than Whites in winning CoVm. The racial disparity in CoVm decisions is especially concerning given past findings that people of color suffer heightened negative local pretrial publicity. In light of the findings, we advocate for a more uniform state legislation.

국민참여재판 활성화를 위한 실무적 제안

The current public participation trial system is facing a crisis due to poor performance. If looking at detailed indicators, the situation is serious. This is because the number of applications for public participation trials themselves is being maintained, but the number of enforcement cases is decreasing due to an increase in courts’ exclusion decisions and defendants’ early withdrawals. This can be seen as proof that public participation trials are not easily accepted within the criminal justice process. Since public participation trials are alien to our criminal justice system, we are bound to face many difficulties until this system is fully established. Various methods have been proposed so far to overcome these and activate public participation trials. These include abolition of the defendant application principle, introduction of the mandatory public participation trial principle, restriction on prosecutorial appeals against unanimous acquittal verdicts, and granting of binding forces to jury verdicts. In this paper, the above suggestions, which have already been studied a lot, are not mentioned again. Rather, very microscopic and technical methods are proposed. Above all, constant communication and explanation are needed to relieve the defendant's vague anxiety about the participatory trial. Legally, it is possible to consider continuing the participatory trial even after the defendant withdraws the application. When an application for a participatory trial is filed, the court should not exclude it based on vague provisions. When making an inevitable decision to exclude, it should specify as detailed reasons as possible. In addition, it is considered necessary to proceed with the trial as quickly as possible to reduce the fatigue and burden of courts and jurors performing participatory trials. Therefore, the jury selection method should be unified in a way that allows quick jury selection. Most important of all, it is to efficiently conduct a written investigation by the prosecutor, which takes a very long time in a participatory trial. It is necessary to prepare active alternatives, such as issuing records to the jury in the form of electronic records. This can be said to be a kind of emergency prescription, not a fundamental solution. Nevertheless, the reason for making some suggestions in this paper is because I think an immediate response to recent public participation trials is required. If the current downturn continues, it is difficult to rule out the risk that the public participation trial will go to the process of factual abolition. I hope that the public participation trial will soon be activated above a certain level, and that it will be reborn as a more advanced system beyond normalization.

Exclusion of Extreme Jurors and Minority Representation: The Effect of Jury Selection Procedures

Exclusion of Extreme Jurors and Minority Representation: The Effect of Jury Selection Procedures

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE ACTIVITY OF COURTS WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF JURORS: ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE USA AND KAZAKHSTAN

he authors, based on a comparative analysis of the criminal procedure laws of the USA and Kazakhstan, studied the issues of the activity of courts with the participation of jurors. The choice of the US experience in considering criminal cases by a jury was not accidental, since the USA is the state to use a jury trial and already has its own legal history that is different from the UK. In the course of the analysis, the authors revealed three aspects such as the selection of jurors, the number of jurors, and the voting procedure during sentencing. The selection of jurors under US law has its advantages in comparison with the legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan in terms of simplifying the selection and the right to refuse to participate as a juror. On the issue of the number of jurors, taking into account the US experience, we believe it is possible to reduce them from 12 to 9 and in some cases to 7 jurors. On the issue of majority voting or unanimous voting, based on the experience of the United States, we hold the opinion on the importance of voting by unanimous decision. Based on the positive experience of the USA, the authors proposed several amendments not only to the criminal procedure legislation of Kazakhstan but also to the Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Thus, the authors believe it is necessary to expand the category of criminal cases considered by a court with the participation of jurors, to improve the selection procedure and voting procedure. As well as the possibility of consideration of civil cases by a court with the participation of jurors. We believe all these amendments will have a positive effect in protecting the constitutional rights of citizens and building a rule-of-law state.

The Problem with a Peremptory Challange – a Tool of Racial Discrimination Within American Jury Selection Process

Jury duty serves as one of the fundamental pillars of American democracy, for it encourages direct citizen participation. Yet, the process of selecting its members is characterised by a flaw in form of a peremptory challenge — a tool with considerable potential for abuse since it permits covert discrimination against members of visible minority groups. Despite not being a procedural right protected by the Constitution of the United States, peremptories have entered the canon of provisions thought to be necessary for preserving the fairness of trial due to their long history of employment in the legal system. In the late 1980s, the Supreme Court in Batson v. Kentucky ruled the exclusion of jurors solely on the basis of their race to be unconstitutional and established the first preventative procedural standard against dubious usage of peremptories in form of the Batson Rule. The effectiveness of the said standard remains questionable, for it did not successfully deal with racial discrimination during voir dire but only enabled to formally object to the questionable juror’s strike. This paper aims to put racial discrimination within the American jury system into a historical perspective, analyze the arguments of both the supporters and the opponents of further peremptory challenge usage and consider probable alternatives that might be implemented to successfully prevent discriminatory practices within the American jury selection process.

How Trial Preparation Factors Influence Audit Litigation Outcomes: Insights from Audit Litigators

ABSTRACT Research indicates that auditors have an impoverished understanding of trial preparation factors that, independent of audit quality, can significantly elevate audit litigation risk. As the scholarly literature sheds little insight about the nature and implications of these factors, we identify what factors audit litigators consider in trial preparation, how they expect these factors to affect litigation outcomes, and how they attempt to leverage these factors. To do so, we interview 39 audit litigators, who identify factors germane to trial venues, jury pools, and case arguments. Guided by the elaboration likelihood model, we construct a framework that predicts these factors influence litigation outcomes by changing jurors’ motivation and/or capability to elaborate. Importantly, we find that litigators who defend (sue) auditors strategically maneuver these factors to increase (decrease) the likelihood of higher juror elaboration, because higher elaboration is favorable to auditors. We discuss implications of our results for practice and research. JEL Classifications: K22; K40; K41; M4; M41; M42.

Bayesian Detection of Bias in Peremptory Challenges Using Historical Strike Data

United States law bars using peremptory strikes during jury selection because of prospective juror race, ethnicity, sex, or membership in certain other cognizable classes. Here, we extend a Bayesian approach for detecting such illegal strike bias by showing how to incorporate historical data on an attorney’s use of peremptory strikes in past cases. In so doing, we use the power prior to adjust the weight of such historical information in the analysis. Using simulations, we show how the choice of the power prior’s discounting parameter influences bias detection (how likely the credible interval for the bias parameter excludes zero), depending on the degree of incompatibility between current and historical trial data. Finally, we extend this approach with a prototype software application that lawyers could use to detect strike bias in real time during jury-selection. We illustrate this application’s use with real historical strike data from a convenience sample of cases from one court.

Buying the Verdict

We document evidence that firms systematically increase specialized, locally targeted advertising following the firm being taken to trial in that given location, precisely following initiation of the suit. In particular, we use legal actions brought against publicly traded firms over the 20-year sample period that progress to trial between 1995 and 2014. In terms of magnitude, the increase is sizable: targeted local advertising increases by 23% (t = 4.37) following the suit. They focus their advertisement spikes specifically toward jury trials, and in fact specifically toward the most likely jury pool. Last, we document that these advertising spikes are associated with verdicts, increasing the probability of a favorable outcome. This paper was accepted by Tomasz Piskorski, finance. Funding: We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation [Grant SciSIP-1535813]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4896 .

Quantifying disparate questioning of Black and White jurors in capital jury selection

AbstractNumerous studies have demonstrated that female and Black jurors are under‐represented on juries in criminal cases, especially so when the prosecution seeks the death penalty. The primary, but not exclusive, way in which this happens is that prosecutors remove them from the jury pool through the exercise of peremptory challenges. The practice remains widespread despite the Supreme Court's decision more than 30 years ago holding that using such challenges in a racially (or gender based) discriminatory manner violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the years since, enforcement by the Supreme Court and state and federal courts has been uneven. However, in several recent cases, in finding that prosecutors struck Black venire persons because of their race, the Supreme Court relied in part on evidence that the prosecution questioned Black and White venire persons differently. The legal term of art for this practice is “disparate questioning.”

The Problematic Issues of Jury Selection

It is known that the jury is not an institutionally separate legal entity. It functions alongside the Court of First Instance and is a special form of administration of justice. Unlike ordinary proceedings when a judge makes a decision based on the law, a jury trial relies on the opinions of ordinary citizens applying to their "inner voice" - conscience, "common sense", folk wisdom and intelligence, public morality, sense of justice. That is why jury trial is considered the highest expression of democracy. It is an interesting institution in many ways. The article reviews the problematic issues of jury selection.
 The article analyses theoretical and practical aspects of selecting non-professional judges, the preconditions of their selection, recusals and the jury composition. Legislative changes have been evaluated positively, but there are still challenges. Accordingly, the problems associated with jury selection are identified and the specific recommendations are made to prevent the process from delaying and choose independent, unbiased jurors.

Racial bias in jury selection

Abstract In criminal justice, the controversial peremptory challenge allows lawyers to dismiss potential jury members without giving a reason. Chris Salahub gathers data to paint a picture of racial bias in jury selection

Buttered Bagels

Buttered Bagels

Racial bias in jury selection hurts mock jurors, not just defendants: Testing one potential intervention.

Prosecutors often use race as a basis for excluding Black jurors in cases with Black defendants. The current research tested whether this practice influences juror attitudes (Study 1). It also tested an intervention to prevent racially biased jury selection (Study 2). We predicted that participants exposed to the exclusion of Black prospective jurors would have more negative feelings compared with those who were not exposed to such exclusions (Study 1). We also predicted that participants taking on the role of a prosecutor would be more likely to exclude a Black (vs. White) prospective juror in a case with a Black defendant and that warnings against race-based decisions would result in elaborate race-neutral rationales for the exclusions (Study 2). In Study 1 (N = 228), participants witnessed a simulated jury selection process. For half of the participants, Black jurors were differentially excluded. In Study 2 (N = 298), participants selected between a Black and a White prospective juror for a case with a Black defendant. Exposure to race-based exclusions negatively impacted perceptions of fairness and emotional responses, especially for Black participants (Study 1). Participants were more likely to exclude a Black juror (vs. White juror) but gave race-neutral rationales for their decisions. The effect of race on juror selection was eliminated when participants were warned against using race as a basis for excluding jurors (Study 2). Race-motivated exclusions affect not only Black defendants, by depriving them of their right to a jury of their peers, but also the jurors who remain to deliberate. A warning could be a viable intervention for curbing the influence of race on prosecutorial decisions during jury selection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Constrained optimization of objective functions determined from random forests

In this paper, we examine a data‐driven optimization approach to making optimal decisions as evaluated by a trained random forest, where these decisions can be constrained by an arbitrary polyhedral set. We model this optimization problem as a mixed‐integer linear program. We show this model can be solved to optimality efficiently using pareto‐optimal Benders cuts for ensembles containing a modest number of trees. We consider a random forest approximation that consists of sampling a subset of trees and establish that this gives rise to near‐optimal solutions by proving analytical guarantees. In particular, for axis‐aligned trees, we show that the number of trees we need to sample is sublinear in the size of the forest being approximated. Motivated by this result, we propose heuristics inspired by cross‐validation that optimize over smaller forests rather than one large forest and assess their performance on synthetic datasets. We present two case studies on a property investment problem and a jury selection problem. We show this approach performs well against other benchmarks while providing insights into the sensitivity of the algorithm's performance for different parameters of the random forest.

Juror gender and influence in a domestic violence trial

In two online mock jury deliberation studies (N1 = 326, N2 = 531), I investigate how a juror's gender and emotion expression impacts how influential they are perceived to be and how much influence they actually have in deliberation. Participants perceived a female juror to be less influential than a male juror, but were actually influenced by this juror equally regardless of gender. Neither form of influence was affected by the juror's emotion expression. I argue that because the trial depicted domestic violence, which is culturally associated with female victims, women have more influence in this situation than they typically would. These findings suggest that even when women are influential in interaction, they may not be acknowledged as such. Further, they highlight the importance of task content both theoretically in studies of status and gender and practically in contexts such as jury selection, particularly when that content includes gender-based violence.

Криминалистические аспекты участия гособвинителя в формировании коллегии присяжных с позиций ситуационного подхода

The article considers the tactical aspects of the prosecutor’s participation in forming the jury panel. The study aims to identify and analyze existing tactical issues of the state prosecu­tor’s involvement in this stage of judicial proceedings and develop proposals for their resolu­tion. The research methodology is based on a combination of general scientific and specialized methods, as well as a situational approach. Tactical tasks facing the state prosecutor at this stage of legal proceedings are outlined. From the perspective of the situational approach, the process of establishing and maintaining psychological contact between the prosecutor and potential jury candidates is examined. The ways in which the state prosecutor studies the personalities of potential jurors are presented. The author identifies typical situations of jury selection. A solution to the problem of potential jurors concealing information about them­selves is proposed, involving the identification of situations within the jury candidate ques­tionnaire, depending on the form of the questionnaire and the likelihood of lying in response. The conclusion is drawn that the effective influence of the prosecutor on the composition of the jury panel is based on the judicious use of their right to challenge with cause and without cause, which is grounded in the results of studying the jurors’ personalities.

Supplemental Material for Racial Bias in Jury Selection Hurts Mock Jurors, Not Just Defendants: Testing One Potential Intervention

Supplemental Material for Racial Bias in Jury Selection Hurts Mock Jurors, Not Just Defendants: Testing One Potential Intervention

The collateral consequences of criminal legal association during jury selection

AbstractHow does a potential juror's association with the criminal legal system matter during jury selection? Growing scholarship examines statutory exclusions of people with felony convictions, sometimes characterizing felon-juror exclusion as a collateral consequence of mass incarceration. Less research has considered whether court officials seek to exclude potential jurors based on lower-level forms of contact or perceived association. We draw on interviews with 103 lawyers and judges in a Northeastern state to examine how court officials think about juror bias in relation to criminal legal association beyond felon status. We find that court officials often seek to remove people perceived to be offenders with lower-level forms of system association as well as people perceived to be crime victims. These exclusionary efforts extend to also exclude perceived offenders' and victims' social networks. These practices are racialized and gendered, likely contributing to the systematic exclusion of marginalized racial/ethnic groups and women. This article expands the collateral consequences literature in two ways: first, by revealing how collateral consequences can be conceptualized not just in relation to people criminalized by the law but also in relation to those whom the law constructs as victims; and second, by underscoring how collateral consequences feed back into the system to reproduce its unequal administration.