Across the country, African American defendants are being discriminated against in the criminal courts and by juries, particularly in capital cases.[1] This assertion is supported by two lines of research. First, an analysis of Supreme Court decisions focusing on the racial impact on voir dire. Second, social-legal studies on juror decision making have demonstrated legal and socio-legal histories providing evidence that demonstrate there is a racial bias in our system. Based on these findings, this paper sets forth several legal and policy recommendations to improve the fair adjudication of African American defendants charged with capital crimes. [1] Jack Glaser, Karin D. Martin, Kimberly B. Kahn, Possibility of Death Sentence Has Divergent Effect on Verdicts for Black and White Defendants (2015).

The current dissertation had three primary objectives, categorized into two MTurk studies with capital juror-eligible community members: (a) cross-validate the psychometric properties of the JQVV, (b): explore the role of legal attitudes via the JQVV in mock capital sentencing decisions, and (c): examine the JQVV's ability to detect juror social desirability in capital voir dire. Impressively, Study 1 (N = 552) and Study 2 (N = 313) provided strong and consistent evidence for the JQVV's reliability and construct validity. In the mock juror paradigm, punitive legal attitudes on the JQVV (i.e., Crime-Neg, Convict, and Death-Pos), did not directly affect sentencing decisions, however they indirectly influenced the perception of nearly all other legally relevant variables (e.g., evidence type). For example, participants with more punitive criminal justice attitudes evaluated aggravating evidence more favorably which, in turn, increased death sentence verdicts. Study 1 also underscored the concerningly low levels of comprehension jurors have regarding judicial instructions and other relevant legal knowledge (e.g., the definition of aggravating). In Study 2, the support-life and support-death groups evidenced divergent patterns of social desirability, although support-death participants did not dramatically alter their scores between the genuine and social desirability condition. Additionally, the JQVV Pros-Cyn and Justice-Pos scales were moderately effective at identifying social desirability, marking the first ever questionnaire to examine juror response styles. Implications for research, professional practice in capital jury selection, and legal policy are discussed.

The present study asked two important questions: Does prejudicial pretrial publicity produce bias which may impair juror objectivity and, if it does, can voir dire remedy its untoward effects? Subjects were 68 college undergraduates whose political attitudes had been assessed and who had or had not read case-specific pretrial publicity one week before viewing a murder trial. Trial proceedings took place at the University of Miami law school. Voir dire, trial viewing, and deliberations were conducted in UM's moot courtroom. As predicted, analyses revealed main effects for both voir dire and pretrial publicity such that pretrial publicity increased conviction rate and the extended voir dire decreased conviction rate, but the extended voir dire failed to reduce the specific prejudicial effect of pretrial publicity. These findings suggest that prejudgment of a general nature (e.g., confusion about legal concepts) may be neutralized by an extended voir dire but that prejudice specifically created by exposure to inflammatory news stories is not offset by an extended voir dire format. There is reason to believe, however, that with more time spent explaining case facts and with greater attention to individual jurors, voir dire could eliminate even the specific prejudice created by pretrial publicity.

This study assesses the levels of diversity in the jury source lists in the State of Georgia utilizing voter registration data as of February 1997, and the effects of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) on diversity levels. The data indicates that, while the NVRA has increased registration rates, the rates for blacks has been only slightly higher than that of whites. Thus, the problems of diversity have not been significantly effected by the NVRA.This paper discusses the issue of cognizable class, and reiterates arguments supporting the recognition of young persons and non-voters as cognizable. Also assessed are the methods of measuring source list disparity, with attention given to problems associated with the absolute disparity test, and argues for the use of the Chi-Square "Goodness of Fit" test to measure source list disparity.Current levels of disparity are calculated using both absolute disparity and ChiSquare. These are found in the appendix. Analysis is done by assessing the percentage of source lists (for which there is data) that should be presumed invalid using the five percent criterion for absolute disparity and the fifty percent criterion for Chi-Square.Analysis using both absolute disparity and Chi-Square indicates that many source lists in the State of Georgia are not representative of the population. While absolute disparity invalidates only few source lists, the Chi-Square statistic indicates that the problem is much more widespread.Both absolute disparity and Chi-Square results indicate that age is the most important variable with regard to under-representation. Young persons (18-29) are found to be under-represented more often than any other group regardless of race and/or sex. This is particularly evident when looking at the Chi-square results. While blacks are generally found to be under-represented more often when compared to similar sex and age aggregates for whites, the levels of under-representation of race and sex aggregates remain closely related to age. / Department of Political Science

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