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Race remains important when it comes to jury decisions in criminal trials, but
not exclusively as many people suspect, according to an unusual new University
study. At least in routine cases, jurors nowadays appear not to base verdicts
on defendants' color, the research shows. The racial composition of the
courtroom, however, clearly matters.
"In our experiments, which involved real North Carolinians called for jury
duty, we found no evidence of knee-jerk, vulgar racism," said John Conley,
Kenan professor of law. "On the other hand, jurors aren't color blind, and
manipulation of witnesses' race can change the outcome in significant ways."
A report on the findings appears in the new issue of the University of
Wisconsin Law Review. Besides Conley, authors are William J. Turnier,
Mangum professor of law, and Mary R. Rose, a social psychologist at the
American Bar Foundation in Chicago.
"In the wake of the notorious O.J. Simpson and Rodney King cases - and more
recently, the acquittal of the New York police officers accused of killing
Amadou Diallo - few issues in the administration of justice have drawn as much
attention, both scholarly and public, as the practical effects of race in the
courtroom," the authors wrote.
"Scholars have debated the existence, nature and moral and political
significance of racial effects," they said. "In the political arena, public
officials, candidates and commentators across the ideological spectrum have
been quick to jump on the bandwagon, reconstructing contested events so as to
generate capital with their respective constituencies."
Past studies have focused on the effects of race in trials, but results have
been inconclusive; no one has successfully replicated trials to test those
effects, Conley said. At Turnier's suggestion and with Rose's expert help, the
team set about doing just that.
They created two videotaped versions of a short criminal case, with one
involving a young white man as the defendant and the other with a young black
man as the defendant. Except for race, the tapes were as identical as possible.
All actors were white except for the young black man.
"We showed this tape over the course of a year to about 400 people in Wake and
Alamance counties in North Carolina," Conley said. "These were people qualified
to serve as jurors who had been summoned for jury duty at the courthouse that
day. Half watched the black defendant version, and half watched the white
defendant version."
After statistical analyses of jurors' opinions, the findings surprised the
researchers.
"We found a statistically significant effect, and that was that the black
defendant was convicted substantially less often than the white defendant," the
professor said. "Also, prosecution witnesses were more credible when they
testified against the white defendant, and the alibi witness was less credible
when he testified for the white defendant."
Jurors, regardless of their own race, acted essentially the same, researchers
found. Whites didn't stick up for whites, and blacks didn't stick up for
blacks.
For a second round of showings, the team replaced a white female prosecution
witness with a black woman and the white male alibi witness with a black man.
"This brought about a striking change in the outcome," Conley said. "Whereas
the first time around, the white guy was convicted significantly more often,
now there was no difference in conviction rates. Each defendant was found
guilty about 50 percent of the time."
In experiments where they altered class - how much money the defendants'
parents appeared to have - they found no differences in conviction rates. The
findings on race prompted the group to propose a theory they call "the racial
ecology of the courtroom."
"We believe the most likely interpretation of the first situation was that
people were sensitive to the isolation of the black man in an all-white
prosecution environment," Turnier said. "Jurors, both black and white, acted
like they thought this guy was being ganged up on and believed there was
something wrong with that. When we injected racial balance into the courtroom
by having a black prosecution witness, that concern seemed to evaporate."
One lesson from the study is that people both within and outside the legal
system shouldn't make simplistic assumptions about the influence of race on a
jury, he said. Racism isn't a given, at least at this time in the nation's
history, but the effect of the racial mix at trial is both real and
complicated.
"Another ramification of this work is that it gives you a new kind of argument
for diversity," Turnier said. "We usually make arguments for diversity on
essentially moral grounds. Here is a very practical reason - that when you have
the sense that the courtroom is representative, then jurors don't think about
race. They focus exclusively on the evidence, which is what we would hope they
do."
The professor said it was regrettable that people judged the nation's legal
system by results in the O.J. Simpson trial, which was highly atypical. More
than 99.9 percent of criminal cases don't get a lot of publicity, don't have
high-priced lawyers, don't include celebrities and don't involve people making
overt efforts to manipulate race.
"To me personally, the single most striking thing about this work was the
similarity, the indistinguishability, in how white jurors and African-American
jurors responded throughout the experiments," Conley said. "They were
responding in exactly the same way to all the different cues we gave them."
Turnier, Rose and Conley have presented their study to faculty at various
university law schools around the country, including Duke, Virginia, Alabama
and Georgetown and also to the Law and Society Association, the major
professional group for scholars doing social science research about the law,
they said. The reaction was good because people are eager to acquire hard data
on what race really means for the legal system.
The team plans to expand its work by varying the cues jurors receive from
defendants' videotaped appearance, speech and apparent background, Turnier
said. That's important because such cues might prompt racial stereotypes that
affect verdicts. Also, crimes that some people associate with particular races
might influence jurors' decisions and need to be studied.
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