The Bunk Science of Juries

This wikilog article is a draft, it was not published yet.

by: Abassos • February 22, 2012 • no comments

Apparently there's not much to the science of choosing juries:

Despite hundreds of studies on the matter, ranging from simulated trials to post-trial juror interviews to field studies of real juries, most obvious juror characteristics, including occupation, income, religion, and age, haven't been shown to correlate in any consistent way with verdict outcomes. Personality types aren't much more instructive. People who believe "in a just world," for example, have been known to come down hard on criminal defendants in some cases, while at other times they seem to lack sympathy for the victims of the crime. . . . . .Even with all these complicating factors and fuzzy science, however, a few juror traits have been quantifiably associated with verdict outcomes. Unfortunately, those correlations are among the most troubling imaginable for our legal system. Dennis Devine, a psychology professor at Purdue University, combed through the research for his upcoming book, Jury Decision Making: The State of the Science, and found that jurors tend to be more lenient on defendants who share the same race. The impact is fairly minor-that is, except in capital cases, in which black defendants are significantly more likely to receive the death penalty when there are a lot of white men on a jury and no black men to offset them. The trend has been traced through hundreds of death-penalty trials, not to mention corroborated by lab experiments, and the bias is worse if the black defendant is accused of killing a white person.

From The Science of Getting Out of Jury Duty in Slate online.

h/t Rankin Johnson (check out his Twitter feed).