Black Jury Pools And Conviction Rates

From Duke Today comes news of a study which delivers one for the stats heads and two for the laugh track; from Duke Today:

Study: All-White Jury Pools Convict Black Defendants 16 Percent More Often Than Whites

Durham, NC - Juries formed from all-white jury pools in Florida convicted black defendants 16 percent more often than white defendants, a gap that was nearly eliminated when at least one member of the jury pool was black, according to a Duke University-led study.  

The researchers examined more than 700 non-capital felony criminal cases in Sarasota and Lake counties from 2000-2010 and looked at the effects of the age, race and gender of jury pools on conviction rates.  

The jury pool typically consisted of 27 members selected from eligible residents in the two counties. From this group, attorneys chose six seated jurors plus alternates.

"I think this is the first strong and convincing evidence that the racial composition of the jury pool actually has a major effect on trial outcomes," said senior author Patrick Bayer, chairman of Duke's Economics Department.

Did anyone pick up on the phrase "jury pool"?  I only see it in the headline and five more times in the text, so maybe it is understandable that Adam Serwer of Mother Jones wrote this for the laugh track:

Study: All-White Juries More Likely To Convict Black Defendants

Duke University released a study on Tuesday that examined the impact of race in jury polls in Florida, and there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that, according to the study, which looked at 700 cases between 2000 and 2010, all-white juries are significantly more likely to convict black defendants than white ones. The good news is that a single black juror can alter that dynamic.

And away he goes - the study proves what he already knew about racist white Souterners, so why read on? And Raw Story reads Adam Serwer so they follow him over a cliff with "Study finds white juries more likely to convict black defendants".  Another lefty meme is born!

But, if we can leave the Reality-Based Community and return to reality, (and here is the puzzle) the study said nothing like that.

The authors followed two Florida counties that are about 95% white. Six person juries were formed from prospective pools of twenty-seven people. If the twenty-seven were all white, blacks experienced a higher conviction rate. If the pool started with one or two blacks, the conviction rate fell for blacks regardless of the eventual composition of the six person jury.

Weird?  I am not sure how to explain that. If the eventual jury is all white, why did having a black in the pool affect the result? A guess - if the prosecutor maneuvers to drop a black juror it opens the door to whites that may be sympathetic to the defense and would otherwise have been struck. Well, Law and Order covers few Florida trials, so I am out of ammo.

Here is the abstract, which again hints at the importance of the phrase "jury pool":

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.

I am going to hit the "Publish" button now and read on; I may have to amend my own summary, but perhaps some of the legal talent can help me out.

BORING: My guess is as good as theirs. The authors note that even when the final jury is all-white, blacks in the pool may have helped the defense, for  the reason I suggested above:

Adding black potential jurors to the pool can also affect trial outcomes even when these jurors are not ultimately seated on the jury. This indirect effect comes about through the jury selection process if attorneys on each side use their peremptory challenges to strike the potential jurors most likely to be hostile to their case. We would expect the defense attorney, for example, to systematically strike those jurors with the highest ex ante probabilities of conviction (i.e., those in the upper tail of the distribution) based on their observable attributes and answers to pretrial questioning. In this way, whenever attorneys use peremptory challenges to strike black members of the pool (presumably when they are in the tail of the distribution), they forgo the possibility of excluding another potential juror with a similar ex ante probability of convicting. This pulls the likelihood of conviction for the seated jurors toward that excluded person's position even though he or she does not wind up serving on the jury.

IT TAKES ALL KINDS: There are all sorts of whites and blacks. The authors note that blacks are as likely to eventually be seated as whites, which is uplifting:

...the distributions of ex ante likelihoods of conviction for white and black members of the jury pool may naturally overlap significantly when there is substantial within-race heterogeneity. Given this heterogeneity, the attorneys will effectively seat a significant number of black potential jurors whose ex ante likelihoods of conviction are not all that different than those of the seated white jurors.

NO, THE RESULT IS NOT DRIVEN BY THE FINAL JURY COMPOSITION: You had to know they would consider the possibility that blacks in the pool sometimes results in blacks on the jury, thereby driving their result.  Not happening:

That the presence of black members of the jury pool might have a substantial effect on trial outcomes even when no black jurors are actually seated for the trial is also consistent with the pattern of correlation of the composition of the seated jury with trial outcomes. Strikingly, ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of the black–white conviction rate gap when there is at least one black member of the seated jury are almost identical to the estimated causal effect of having at least one black potential juror in the pool. That these point estimates are similar in magnitude despite the fact that a black juror is seated in only 40% of the cases in which there is a black member of the jury pool implies that jury race has a broader impact than what a naive OLS analysis of the effect of seated jury composition would suggest. That is, although the black–white conviction gap declines by an average of 16 percentage points in all trials in which there is at least one black member of the jury pool, a naive OLS analysis of the effect of the seated jury would instead appear to imply that such a decline occurred only in the smaller subset of cases in which a black juror was actually seated.

TO BE FAIR: The authors acknowledge an obvious baseline problem:

The ability of our analysis to draw firm conclusions about the fairness of trial outcomes, however, is fundamentally limited by the fact that the strength of the evidence in cases brought against white and black defendants is not observed directly in the data. As a result, it is impossible to draw firm conclusions about what relative conviction rates should be for black and white defendants. If, in fact, the strength of the evidence in cases involving black and white defendants is comparable, our results would imply that juries resulting from all-white jury pools require weaker standards of evidence to convict black versus white defendants, whereas juries resulting from jury pools with at least some black members apply comparable standards.

Bolstering their case - the jury pool composition varies day by day (they say) but these cases would normally be in the prosecutorial pipeline for days or weeks.  A *possible* confounder - same day plea bargains, where the defense and prosecution look at the pool at opening day of the trial and strikes a deal. My first blush is that a defense attorney with a black defendant and a strong case will proceed regardless of the jury pool; if the case is weak, an all-white pool may prompt an attempt at settlement.

That *suggests* that all-white pools see only strong defenses, whereas mixed pools may see a mix of strong and longshot defenses. However, since the conviction rate is higher with the all white pools, my same-day settlement theory is pointing in the wrong direction when viewed exclusively from the defense perspective. I hate it when that happens... So let's reverse that arrow!

The prosecutor can seee the jury pool too. If it is all-white, the DA won't be offering a generous deal to a black defendant, so even a defendant with a weak case will press forward.

But if the prosecutor sees a black candidate or two inb the jury pool, he/she might decide to offer a generous deal to a defendant with a seemingly weak case (black defendants with a strong case and a favorable pool don't expect a deal, they expect a win).

So now we can imagine that the conviction rate ought to be higher with an all-white pool because the DA rolls up the score against weak cases that would otherwise have gotten a deal against a more favorable pool. Well, it's a theory...

And the theory was tested against the data!  OK, it came up a loser, but still:

Columns (4)–(6) consider the robustness of the results to alternative ways of categorizing trial outcomes that are not simple verdicts of “guilty” or “not guilty” by the jury. For instance, column (4) redefines as guilty 133 cases in Lake County that are pled by the defendant at some point after a jury pool is chosen (but before the case actually goes to the jury). It is theoretically ambiguous whether such cases should be included in the analysis (categorized as guilty verdicts). On one hand, it makes sense to include them if these plea bargains are reached because the composition of the jury implies that a guilty verdict is very likely. On the other hand, if these plea bargains are reached for reasons unrelated to the jury composition (as they would be if reached prior to jury selection), including them biases the coefficients toward 0 as the outcome is, by construction, the same for all of these trials regardless of the jury composition.29 Column (5) recodes those 25 Sarasota cases that did not have guilty or not guilty jury verdicts associated with it (see note 14) as not guilty, and column (6) repeats the same exercise, coding these cases as guilty. In all cases, the results are very similar to the benchmark results reported in column (1) of Table V.

OK, I like the way they are thinking.

QUALITY OF DEFENSE: If (*IF*) the white defendants as a group are wealthier than the black defendants they may have better legal representation, which could lead to a lower conviction rate for whites. Doesn't explain these results, but it may be worth keeping in mind.

Also possibly worth keeping in mind - I am stuck on the notion that most cases don't go to trial, so any case that does go to trial is already a bit of an outlier. For example, I once sat on a jury where the defense had nothing, but it was the defendant's Third Strike so any plea meant a long sentence. readong on, I see that gest a mention:

In fact, almost 90% of criminal defendants in U.S. District Courts plead guilty and 97% of all convictions are the result of plea rather than a conviction by a court or jury.36 As a result of these pretrial selection mechanisms, the set of cases that go to trial are systematically more likely to be those where the quality of the evidence is in considerable dispute among the parties. Thus, it might not be terribly surprising if potential jurors have fairly diffuse ex ante conviction rates for this especially select subset of cases.

As to what conclusions can be drawn, the authors are quite careful:

What our results imply regarding the fairness of jury trials for defendants of each race is much more difficult to say. As the discussion of Section V makes clear, when jurors have heterogeneous likelihoods of conviction, any random variation in the jury pool will affect the likelihood that the seated jury convicts the defendant. But such a model has nothing to say about which juror in the distribution is applying the most appropriate ex ante standard of evidence for defendants of each race. The problem is that without any direct measure of the objective strength of the evidence that is brought in cases with black versus white defendants, we have no way of discerning what relative conviction rates for black versus white defendants should be. If, in fact, the quality of the evidence brought in the cases of white and black defendants in our sample is comparable, our results would imply that juries formed from all-white jury pools require a weaker standard of evidence to convict black versus white defendants. This is a very serious potential implication of our analysis, but one that we cannot reach conclusively without knowing more about the quality of evidence presented in each case.

Since our friends on the left couldn't even read as far as the word "pool", I assume they won't reach that level of nuance. However, as an example of the point the authors are making, black jurors who assume all white cops are lying are not delivering justice any more evenhandedly than white jurors who assume all blacks are guilty of something.

Comments

[NK]

TomM-- without reading I can give a life experience opinion. Juries made up of whites convict black defendants when the State proves its case, Black jurors convict black defendants when the State proves its case, except in the rare instance of black juror nullification, when a defense lawyer plays up the 'stickin' it to the Man' angle. that happens about-- oh-- 16% of the time. "Lies, damnable lies, and statistics." Words to live by.

[Kevin B]

Junk. Science.

[Jane (where is Jon Corzine?)]

"I think this is the first strong and convincing evidence that the racial composition of the jury pool actually has a major effect on trial outcomes,"

I guess they missed the OJ trial.

[JeffC]

the report could also have said:

juries with one or more African American members of the jury pool free black criminals by a higher percentage.

Notice there was no attempt to find out if these convictions were incorrect. I assume the sample size of white defendants was significanly smaller than African American defendants. the 16% difference could be as simple as too small a sample size where one more or less conviction skews the percentages.

[Clarice]

I seem to recall if all the black jurors were struck from a jury pool, the defense may argue that the pool was tainted but I'm not in a hurry to confirm my recollection.
I will say my husband and I experienced on DC juries that black jurors were more likely than we were to find guilt by black defendants-or potential indictees . For one thing they knew the territories where the crimes cured much better than we did and for another those people were more likely to harm the people in the jurors' neighborhoods than they were in ours.

[MarkO]

Racism. Lovely.

[Rob Crawford]

They found what they set out to find. Shocka.

[Ignatz]

1. Did they control for the types of crimes and differences in the defendants besides race?
2. Did different jury make up effect white conviction rates?

Only had time to glance so don't know.

[Ignatius J Donnelly]

i don't believe it but I do believe that not wearing seat belts is actually safer because you are more likely to be ejected from the car thus sparing you from beling crushed or drowned.

[Captain Hate]

Notice there was no attempt to find out if these convictions were incorrect.

Yes, completely lacking from these types of studies is whether a series of laughably absurd verdicts were reached by either side.

[Rick Ballard]

Ignatz,

I don't feel like looking either but I'll add

3. Was a control established for the use of public defenders?

Just on the off chance that a guilty as charged defendant might roll the dice using public money. The downside is the risk of a heavier sentence than a plea bargain would draw. I'd also like to know if a control for three strike convictions was utilized. That's one where rolling the dice is definitely a plus.

[JeffC]

the study makes no attempt to determine prior convictions of the defendants nor do they check to see if there are conviction rate difference for the various levels of crimes ...

[Clarice]

It's DUKE, guys.

[Danube of Thought]

I sense a fresh outpouring of preening moral superiority from the usual suspects will begin any moment now.

[Jack is Back!]

Heh!

From the study, they are counting Hispanics in both Sarasota and Lake Counties as Whites for the purpose of the study. 7.9% of population in Sarasota is Hispanic and its 12.1% in Lake. The study uses two sets: White and Black.

George Zimmerman should have no problem if he is tried in either county since he is considered White!

[Carl Pham]

I don't see why a +16% rate of conviction by all-white jury pools is evidence of prejudice. For all we know, what we have here is a -16% rate of conviction by jury pools with at least one black. That is, it could be the latter is letting the guilty off, rather the former is convicting innocents.

One might reasonably think that jurors want to look fair to their peers -- proximately, the rest of the jury pool. If the rest of the pool is white, their only considerations might be fairness or attentivity or intelligence, whatever. If some of the rest of the pool are black, they might worry about being seen as racist if they vote to convict. Hence, it could well be that they lean towards acquittal, even if the evidence doesn't point that way.

But any way you parse it, the idea that blacks are ALWAYS convicted at rates above their rates of actual criminal behavior is...well, racist.

[narciso]

It's Duke following Serwer following Raw Story, as Austin Powers would say ' now I'm feeling woozy' after one of the time travel episodes.

[Carl Pham]

Maybe I should add that the similarity that comes to my mind is to sexism. Would female defendants be more or less likely to be convicted if the jury pool were all male or just mostly male? My guess is if that jury pool contained just one or two women, even an all-male jury would be less likely to convict, for fear of being seen as sexist.

[Neo]

Speaking of dog food …

“And when talking about seniors, seniors love getting junk mail. It’s sometimes their only way of communicating or feeling like they’re part of the real world,” Reid continued.

[JeffC]

from the study ...

with jury pools having 4+ blacks

conviction rates ...

Black defendants 63%
White defendants 80%

(would seem to say that blacks are biased against whites)

with jury pools having 3 blacks

conviction rates ...

Black defendants 73%
White defendants 63%

(would seem to say that blacks are biased against blacks)

with jury pools having 2 blacks

conviction rates ...

Black defendants 68%
White defendants 73%

(would seem to say that blacks are biased against whites)

with jury pools having 1 black

conviction rates ...

Black defendants 73%
White defendants 74%

(would seem to say no bias found)

with jury pools having 0 blacks

conviction rates ...

Black defendants 81%
White defendants 66%

(would seem to say that whites are biased against blacks)

the study is very unclear about the average number of charges filed against each defendant by race ...

they count any guilty verdict and only count non guilty if all charges were dismissed ...

any defendant with multiple charges would be more likely to get a guilty verdict ...

among the 333 black defendants there were a total of 356 charges for:
Any drug charge
Any murder charge
Any robbery charge
Any other violent charge
Any weapons charge

among the 379 white defendants there were a total of 234 charges for:
Any drug charge
Any murder charge
Any robbery charge
Any other violent charge
Any weapons charge

the biggest reason for this large difference appears to be drug and weapons charges ...
It would seem to be that those types of charges would have the highest rates of conviction as they are almost purely evidence based (you either had the drug/gun or you didn't) so a possible answer to why the difference in conviction rates could be that black defendants are charged much more often with crimes that are easily convicted ...

not sure this study proves racism but it certainly is interesting ...

[lyle]

Funny. I just completed my own study of the exact same topic using regression anaylsis, multivariant sequencing and goat entrails.

My results prove you're all racists!

Remit reparations payment now.

[lyle]

Speaking of seniors...shouldn't you be about ready for a nice retirement home just about now, Harry? You effing dirtbag.

[sbw]

Neo, it turns out that S.1789 is worthwhile. It's Harry Reid who is not.

The Postmaster General's approach, killing rural delivery, Saturday delivery, and diluting the delivery standards all for the sake of the postal unions won't save the USPS -- it will hasten its demise.

[Jane (where is Jon Corzine?)]

OT:

Dick Clark died

[lyle]

That is shocking, Jane. I mean it's shocking to me he was...still alive.

[Rick Ballard]

Lyle,

What color were the goats?

[Jane (where is Jon Corzine?)]

I think he died when he heard that Obama had a paw for lunch.

[sbw]

Dick was my grandfather's sister's (Julia Barnard Clark) son.

[AliceH]

I was going to make a great point, but JeffC covered it, times 100.

[Jane (where is Jon Corzine?)]

Sorry SBW.

[sbw]

Dick got his start, as did his father, at our family newspaper's radio station, WRUN. I knew his mom, Aunt Jule, much better than Dick. (Jule was the only girl of seven children) but Dick and his cousin, my mother, wrote occasionally. I am off now to tell her.

[Sue]

Good grief. I think Tom has joined the funemployment bunch.

[Sue]

SBW,

So sorry.

[Sue]

He started working in the mailroom of WRUN, a radio station in upstate New York run by his father and uncle. It wasn't long before the teenager was on the air, filling in for the weatherman and the announcer.

It never ceases to amaze me at the connections around here.

[NK]

RIP Dick Clark- condolences to the family

[Dave (in MA)]

My favorite Dick Clark moment.

[lyle]

You got me there, Rick. I take a certain prode in unwrapping the various meta themes on JOM but I don't have any idea what you're getting at.

Condolences to his family, though. Was he a centenarian of did it just feel that way?

[Clarice]

Sorry, sbw.

[Rick Ballard]

"You got me there, Rick"

Lyle,

You neglected to specify the color of the goats from which the entrails were acquired. Regression anaylsis and multivariant sequencing are well and good but if you didn't make the proper adjustment for the color of the goats, then your results may be questionable.

[lyle]

facepalm

[lyle]

But you're all still racists.

[Jack is Back!]

sbw,

Our condolences to your family. Dick Clark was an icon of early TV for me. I am not much of a R&R person but back when I was a kid he made the music fun.

Dave (in MA): LOL. Great scene. We have a few Jony's here I believe.

[Ignatz]

He's where every song gets a 98 and has a good beat you can dance to.

[MarkD]

Duku University, of the Duke 88 fame? Not a word of this study is to be believed, including a and the.

[Forbes]

Seems like a good place for a shout-out. JustOneMinute and commenter Extraneous got a mention in the introduction to Harry Stein's latest book, "No Matter What..Tthey'll Call This Book Racist: How Our Fear of Talking Honestly About Race Hurts Us All"
FYI, FWIW.

[sbw]

Thanks, all.

Telling my mother prompted more interesting stories about the early WRUN radio station days.

[JS]

Categorizing this under "statistical noise". When you have a smallish sample size, there's going to be variation more than if they'd used more counties because of the law of large numbers. There might be some effect - because of the fact that African-Americans in general are more likely to be politically liberal (providing a race-neutral reason for the prosecutor to challenge them) - but the research seems far from convincing. The number of cases is far to small to draw significant conclusions.

[Sara]

Neo: Reid is a fool. My Mother got her first computer when she was in her 80s and for more than 10 years she carried on an active correspondence with more than a dozen old friends. She did most of her shopping online, she belonged to an online bridge group, and she used her computer to travel the world, publish her art, get the daily news and watch the stock market, and listen to music. She despised junk mail. I am now a senior and I do not know anyone who does not have a computer and a cell. Who reads junk mail?

[Jim Ryan]

Dick was my grandfather's sister's (Julia Barnard Clark) son.

Your first cousin once removed, I think.

[JeremyR]

I was part of a jury pool for a murder trial. Murders are rare in my county, so the pool was huge, well over 100 people. Out all that, only one was black. And of course, she was picked.

So I wonder what the odds are, if you are black living in a predominately white country, of being a juror. Probably way out of whack, I would guess.

[Tim Ozenne]

I'm curious. Who is it that hangs around all these court rooms and records the race of the pools and juries? Does the state collect and release these data? Do they include also sex, age, occupation, or other data in the statistics?
Is this just "selected" FL counties, or all counties? Are comparable data available for all states, or at least other states?

[Tim Ozenne]

Never mind. The answer to my main question is in the article, sort of. It does reveal why only race is reported.

[Eugene V Debs]

If the Victoria's Secret Catalog is considered junk mail then I'm all for junk mail.

[crypticguise]

There are many other possibilities here that might slant the conviction rates irrespective of the jury pool/s.

Black defendants are more likely to have had prior offenses or convictions.

A juror is going to give extra weight to convicting a "recidivist".

This type of Study almost NEVER factors in all of the variables.

[AliceH]

crypticguise - past acts are not allowed as evidence in a trial, so neither jurors nor jury pools would have any knowledge of potentional recidivism when rendering a verdict.

[Rich Rostrom]

90% of criminal defendants in U.S. District Courts plead guilty and 97% of all convictions are the result of plea...

Working back from these numbers - it turns out that 73% of defendants who go totrial are acquitted. (Trials are 10% of defendants, but only 3% of convictions.)

Interesting.

[sbw]

Yes, Jim, first cousin once removed.

BTW, to the surprise of no one here, the New York Times got it wrong. The Times said Dick Clark's father owned the radio station.

I'll bet even Tiger Beat got it right.