Deselecting Biased Juries
Critics of peremptory-challenge systems commonly contend that they inevitably inflict inequality harm on many excused persons and should be abolished. Ironically, the Supreme Court fueled this argument with its decision in Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), by raising and endorsing the inequality claim sua sponte and then purporting to solve it with an approach that preserved peremptories. But the article shows that something other than inequality harm to excused persons is actually the central problem. The Court in the Batson cases only obliquely confronted it, because constitutional rulings cannot appropriately resolve it. That problem is the harm to disadvantaged litigants when their opponents use peremptories to secure a one-sided jury. The problem can arise often -- whenever a venire is slanted in favor of one of the parties. The advantaged litigant can use peremptories to seat a large group of favorable jurors regardless of how the disadvantaged litigant exercises its peremptories. However, there is a remedy. Peremptory systems reflect the idea that parties acting in their self-interests can help pursue group neutrality on a jury. Similarly, by conferring on litigants a right to stop peremptories at any time, states can enlist them to determine when opposing parties are using peremptories to promote group bias.
Postconviction Review of Jury Discrimination: Measuring the Effects of Juror Race on Jury Decisions
In the spring of 1992, a state jury with no black members acquitted four white police officers charged with using excessive force to restrain black motorist Rodney King. Many Americans who had watched the relentlessly televised videotape of the officers delivering sixty-one baton blows in eighty-one seconds found the acquittals incredible.2 Some suggested that the defendants would have been convicted if blacks had been on the jury.3 Others considered such assumptions racist; presuming that a verdict may depend on the race of the jurors, they countered, is impermissible.4 Still others argued that no one can
Race, Rape, and Bias: Distortion of Prior Odds and Meaning Changes
Two experiments were conducted to investigate how racial bias affects juror decision making. Three sources of bias were studied: (1) prior probabilities of guilt, (2) distortion of the meaning of evidence, and (3) differential weighting of information. A paired comparison technique employed in the first study revealed that pretrial probabilities of guilt were greater when the victim was White than when she was Black. In the second experiment, a different group of subjects viewed one of four videotaped simulated rape trials in which seven segments of testimony had been previously rated as pro-prosecution, pro-defense, or neutral. During the trial, subjects rated each segment on three different scales: prosecution, defense, and degree of defendant guilt. Results indicated that neutral evidence was seen as more favorable to prosecution for a White victim compared to a Black victim. Evidence which favored either prosecution or defense was not distorted. Regression analyses revealed a positive relationship bet...