The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials

PWP-CCPR-2011-002

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of jury racial composition on trial outcomes using a unique data set of felony trials in Florida between 2000-2010. We utilize 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. IV estimates of the effect of the racial composition of the seated jury on trial outcomes are about 2.5 times greater than the corresponding OLS estimates, implying that 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.