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Black? On trial in Florida? You don’t want an all-white jury!
Infographics are fabulous inventions. We can spend a long time describing the results of a study or we can simply show you a picture. In this case, it’s an infographic designed by Duke University.
Yes, you saw that right. Some new research mirrors the findings of research conducted three decades ago!
If you were a black criminal defendant in Florida between 2000 and 2010, with an all white jury you were convicted 81% of the time. On the other hand, if you were a white criminal defendant with an all white jury, you were only convicted 66% of the time. If, however, there were African Americans (even just one) on your jury–the difference in conviction rates between black and white defendants almost disappeared.
Justice is not intended to be a random event and one of the researchers speaks to that in a story on the research.
“The findings imply that the application of criminal justice is “highly uneven,” Bayer said, because conviction rates vary substantially with random variation in the racial composition of the jury pool.
“Simply put, the luck of the draw on the racial composition of the jury pool has a lot to do with whether someone is convicted and that raises obvious concerns about the fairness of our criminal justice system,” Bayer said.”
There are clearly issues that need to be addressed and it likely is not only in Florida. While there are ways to reduce these sorts of verdict discrepancies by raising jurors’ awareness of the need to behave in a non-biased fashion, it is disturbing that the difference between conviction of white and black defendants is demolished by having a single juror of color.
If you are a defense attorney, this is likely a good article as evidence that, even in 2012, your African American client is less likely to get a fair trial with an all-white jury.
Anwar, S., Bayer, P., & Hjalmarsson, R. (2012). The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127 (2), 1017-1055 DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjs014
Black? On trial in Florida? You don’t want an all-white jury! » The Jury Room http://t.co/602z6Mrx via @KeeneTrial
Thanks for the thorough response, Rita! I will get ahold of the full-text article and read it with interest.
Thanks for your thoughtful query, Zachary. This is not a quick question to answer! First, what this research illustrates is something we have known for decades. Many of us had hoped it was improving. This project, conducted in Florida of FELONY trials shows us things haven’t changed all that much. To respond to your question, I am going to cut and paste from the article itself.
The author’s abstract:
“This article examines the impact of jury racial composition on trial outcomes using a data set of felony trials in Florida between 2000 and 2010. We use 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.”
With regard to disparities in crimes between African American and Caucasian defendants:
“Overall, 44% of defendants are black and the average number of charges is 2.99. We identify whether each defendant is charged with an offense in the following categories, regardless of the verdict associated with the charge: murder (noncapital), robbery, other violent offenses, property offenses, drug offenses, sex offenses, weapons offenses, and other offenses. Overall, the most com- mon crime categories are other offenses (33%), other violent of- fenses (31%), and drug offenses (25%). There are some differences in the distribution of crime types across defendant race: 37% of black defendants have at least one drug charge compared with 14% of white defendants. In contrast, 8% of black defen- dants are charged with a sex offense compared to 18% of white defendants.”
With regard to conviction and type of crime:
“…all-white jury pools convict black defendants of drug crimes at an almost 25 percentage point higher rate than white defendants and that this gap is not only eliminated but reversed when at least one black potential juror is added to the pool. In this case, the gap closes both because conviction rates for white defen- dants rise whereas those for blacks fall significantly. A similar pattern emerges for violent crimes, although the only coefficient that is statistically significant in this case is the interaction term, which implies that adding at least one black potential juror to the pool decreases conviction rates for black defendants relative to whites.”
Overall, this is a complex (very complex–39 pages filled with data and charts) article that deserves a careful reading to understand nuances. An infographic necessarily restricts complexity and so what it illustrates is the stark reality of an overall finding. The article in full is no less disturbing than the infographic but well worth a read for the additional information it provides.
Thanks again Zachary for inquiring about research design/construction.
How did the researchers control for variables such as the amount of evidence presented in each case, the types of crimes being tried / severity of offense, and the like?
It strikes me that other intervening variables could drive this phenomenon. For example, if whites and blacks are being charged with different types of crimes by the prosecutors, it might be that the observed effect is a function of prosecutorial bias—not jury bias.
In what ways did the investigators authoring this research account for such case-specific factors that can influence a verdit?