Them: Discussing Race's Effect on Juries' Decisions

“It’s those people! I’m tellin’ you…” Juror 10 shouts as the twelve jurors begin deliberations in Reginald Rose’s play Twelve Angry Men (10). “You know what they’re like…these people are born to lie! (64)” They are such simple words, but Juror 10’s use of those, they’re, they, and them bring a host of implications and questions. Who are those people? And because this boy (that is on trial for murdering his father) is one of them, does that imply that he is guilty or that the chances of him being guilty are higher than if he were not one of them? These are deliberately sarcastic questions with an underlying point. Juror 10, also known as the bigot, has associated certain characteristics with the defendant simply because of his ethnic and social background. Juror 10 has stereotyped the defendant. The caricature of Juror 10 begs the question, are juries racist? This question comes at time where the irony of race relations in America is so clearly apparent. The progress of social equality can be witnessed in the fact that an African American man has a legitimate opportunity to win the White House, yet it is obvious that more progress can be made when examining the incarceration rates of minorities in this country.
There are some compelling statistics regarding this issue. According to the Department of Justice, 32% of all African-American males will enter a State or Federal Prison during there lifetime, compared to 17% of Hispanic males, and just 5.9% of White males. A study examining imprisonment rates in the state of Washington presents some more interesting results.
The results of our present study indicate-across counties-that the relative size of the minority population, the economic standing of minorities, and the degree of urbanization have significantly different effects on white and nonwhite rates of imprisonment (Bridges, Crutchfield, and Simpson 1987; 355).

These statistics seem to support Juror 10’s assumptions, that those people are just apt to committing crimes. This is exactly the assumption that this essay will attempt to address. Minorities are incarcerated a higher rate, but is this due to bias juries? Before we move on, it should be acknowledged that generational poverty, inadequate education, and other factors affect minority incarceration rates. These statistics likely correlate to the high minority arrest rates. This plays a decisive role in this study because it affects the percent of minority cases which go to trial, which affects conviction rates and so on. More minorities will be convicted if more minorities are arrested and go to trial. In addition, it is difficult to assess if a minority defendant has been wrongly convicted due to racial prejudice or if that defendant has been convicted correctly but race attributed to the decision to convict. There are a host of known and unknown variables that make answering this question difficult. Again, do juries indeed have racist tendencies or is Juror 10 correct to associate crime with those people?
Sexual assault cases present a unique opportunity to study jury tendencies. Many of these cases lack physical evidence and witnesses, leaving the jury to decide between the creditability of the defendant and the victim. Such scenarios are more susceptible to be determined by the biases of a jury than cases with more solid evidence. “In the absence of compelling physical evidence, victims’ actual and assumed (stereotypical) characteristics might be weighed heavily in jurors’ decisions (Bottoms, Davis, and Epstein 2004; 2).” The same can be said for the defendant. A mock jury study conducted by Bottoms, Davis and Epstein examined this relationship between decisions of juries and the race of both the defendant and victim. Experiments of various scenarios where conducted to determine what role race plays in these cases.
The first experiment cleverly lays out a case scenario in which a 28 year old male teacher is being tried for sexually assaulting a 12 year old girl. To portray race without actually labeling the race of the victim or defendant, the case scenario uses ethnic sounding names. For example, the scenario juggles the names of the victim between Jessica Kelly, Tonya Jones, and Maria Gonzalez to represent a Caucasian American, African-American, and Hispanic American respectively (8). While study the predicted that the race of the victim would play a decisive role in the decision to convict, results showed otherwise.
[T]here was no significant difference in guilty verdicts or credibility judgments as a function of victim race. As predicted, however, the White victim was perceived to be less responsible for her abuse than were either the Black victim or the Hispanic victim (13).

Certainly the variance in responsibility associated with the victim can be somewhat attributed to the stereotype that African Americans and minorities in general are promiscuous and more likely to be sexually active at a young age, thus a minority female child is more likely to provoke a sexual assault than a White female child. Interestingly, while race affected jurors’ perception of the degree of responsibility belonging to the victim, it did not affect the decision to convict the defendant. The results of this first experiment seem to be somewhat encouraging. While jurors may bring stereotypes to deliberations, it seems that they are able to put them aside and decide a case based on the presented evidence.
The results of the second experiment produced results similar to the first. The case scenario of experiment two differed from the first experiment only in the name given to the defendant. The names Don Reed and Darryl Johnson were given to portray a Caucasian American and an African American respectively. Again, this experiment did not support initial hypotheses. It was predicted that there would be higher conviction rates in cases where the victim was White and the defendant Black. The results indicated that jurors were not negatively affected by cases involving different races; “defendants in same-race abuse cases (Black defendant/Black victim and White defendant/White victim) were assigned more degree of guilt than were defendants in different-race abuse cases (Black defendant/White victim and White defendant/Black victim)” (19). Jurors in experiment two determined, similar to experiment one, that minority victims were more responsible for there sexual assaults than were White victims.
The Bottoms, Davis, and Epstein study has provided some positive incite into jury tendencies. This study shows that though jurors may have prejudices, they do not necessarily vote in accordance to those prejudices. In other words, jurors may have pre-existing notions about those people, but in this study it does not effect the ultimate decision. The study did however show both the age of the victim and gender of the juror to be a factor in sexual assault cases. Women were more inclined to side with the victim, while men tended to be more neutral. Additionally, younger victims (age 12) were considered more credible than older victims (age 16). Jurors considered older victims to be more likely to provoke sexual assaults and thus less credible.
The results of this study are interesting considering the complaints about racism in the American legal system. Perhaps juries are actually competent as suggested by Kalven and Zeisel’s American Jury[1], and instances such as the Amadou Diallo[2] and O.J. Simpson cases are select occurrences. This study suggests that cries of injustice should not be directed toward the jury system but toward police officers, unjust sentencing guidelines, and unequal sentencing recommendations provided by prosecutors. It should be noted that Juror 10 has not yet been proven false. Though his opinion is discriminatory and bigoted, it can be argued that the Bottoms, Davis, and Epstein study supports Juror 10’s assumptions. Those people are incarcerated at a higher rate because they are arrested at a higher rate, which could be due to the fact that they commit crimes at a higher rate. Perhaps you actually can’t trust them.
Not so fast. Mock jury studies like the Bottoms, Davis, and Epstein study do have weaknesses. This study, and others like it, used only college students in its assessment, and the case was provided in a written summary instead of live testimony (Sommers and Ellsworth 2003; 1002). In addition, mock jurors evaluated and decided the case individually, without deliberating with other mock jurors. This type of method can have profound effects on the results of a study. (1) College students are higher educated, are often taught to be liberal thinkers, and learn on campuses that often promote diversity. This is not to say that there are no college educated bigots, but the chances of having jurors that are able to put side stereotypes to decide a case are significantly increased when selecting from a pool of college students. The modern jury selection process selects people from all types of backgrounds, including the uneducated and those with prejudices. It is also conceivable that these college students figured out what the independent and dependent variables of the experiment were, and thus decided to vote without prejudice. (2) While the Bottoms, Davis, and Epstein study attempted to simulate race through ethnic sounding names, it cannot produce the actual reality of live testimony. Live testimony provides jurors with a face, voice, and personality to evaluate much like what was done in the deliberations of Twelve Angry Men. The face, voice, and personality of a witness, victim, or defendant would give a juror more opportunities to identify a witness, victim, or defendant as one of those people.
Actual conviction data provides more substantial evidence for the posed question of this essay, however even actual data can be misleading. While we can determine the amount of minorities brought to trial and the number of them convicted, it is more difficult to determine what actually contributed to the decision to convict. It is easy to count the number of minorities vs. Whites convicted, but if a disparity exists it does not necessarily mean that there is a bias (Sommers and Ellsworth 2003; 1000). It simply means that one group was convicted more often than another group. It means nothing more and nothing less. This type of data does allow for certain trends to be established and further explored but it can never be decisively conclusive. When this data is combined with actual juror interviews, then a slightly more definitive determination can be made regarding the role race plays in juries’ decision making.
A 1985 study conducted by Lafree, Reskin, and Visher is of particular interest in this essay because it studies the effects of different variables, race being one, in real sexual assault cases. This study, unlike the Bottoms, Davis, and Epstein study, is examining actual data and combining it with the said opinions of individual jurors (393). This study, like the previously noted study, also showed a correlation between the race of the victim and the decision to convict. “Noteworthy too is jurors’ predisposition to exonerate men accused of raping black women” (397). This study also suggests the Black sexuality stereotype to explain results. It should be noted that the effect that race has on a cases has been somewhat unexpected. In the two studies examined, the race of the defendant has not been as important as the race of the complainant. It is difficult to determine what should be taken from these two studies. Should the jury system be celebrated for not being bias against minority defendants, or should it be condemned for an apparent bias against minority complainants?
This essay questioned the role race plays in juries’ decisions. I thought that I would find black and white evidence to support the notion that juries were actually bias against minority defendants, but this is not what I found. The effect that race has on juries is complicated and mysterious. I have examined only sexual assault cases in this essay, which was likely to hinder the validity of my study. Sommers and Ellsworth suggest that, “White jurors are indeed influenced by a defendant’s race, but this influence is not consistent across cases” (1029). In addition, cases that are obviously racially charged are less likely to be subject to racial bias, as jurors attempt to make impartiality a priority.
White juror bias may be a more serious concern in run-of-the-mill cases when racial issues are not salient and White jurors are not alerted to the need to guard against prejudice (Sommers and Ellsworth 2003; 1029).

Admittedly, this study has produced more questions than answers. While I found extensive research on the effects race has on White jurors, there was limited research on the effects race has on minority jurors. It is more than possible that minorities can be bias against their own race. “I hate Black people too!” comedian Chris Rock shouts while telling a joke during his fourth HBO special. I also found no legal answers to the imprisonment disparity statistics noted in the introduction. Perhaps the answers lie in the structure of society or in culture. Additionally, the studies noted other factors to influence decisions, but in most cases those other factors were just as complicated and mysterious as the race factor. The Sommers and Ellsworth study also suggests that there is a correlation between the racial composition of a jury and the length and quality of deliberations. There has been extensive research on this topic but the research does not point to any specific conclusions. So, are juries racist…well the jury’s still out on that one.


Works Cited

Bottoms, Bette L., Suzanne L. Davis, and Michelle A. Epstein. “Effects of Victim and Defendant Race on Jurors’ Decisions in Child Sexual Abuse Cases.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology. V.H. Winston & Son: 2004. Pgs 1-33.

Bridges, George S., Robert D. Crutchfield, and Edith E. Simpson. “Crime, Social Structure and Criminal Punishment: White and Nonwhite Rates of Imprisonment.” Social Problems. Vol. 34, No. 4. University of California Press: 1987. Pgs 345-361.

Criminal Offender Statistics. 7 Aug 2007. U.S. Department of Justice-Office of Justice Programs: Bureau of Justice Statistics. 4 March 2008

Ellsworth, Phoebe C. “One Inspiring Jury.” Michigan Law Review. Vol. 101 Issue 6. University of Michigan: May, 2003. Pgs 1387-1407

Lafree, Gary D., Barbara F. Franklin, and Christy A. Visher. “Jurors’ Responses to Victims’ Behavior and Legal Issues in Sexual Assault Trials.” Social Problems. Vol. 32 No. 4. April 1985. University of California Press: 1985. Pgs 389-407

Rose, Reginald. Twelve Angry Men. New York: Penguin Group, 1997

Rock, Chris. Never Scared. Directed by Joel Gallen. Home Box Office; 2004.

Sommers, Samuel R. and Phoebe C. Ellsworth. “How Much Do We Really Know About Race and Juries? A Review of Social Science Theory and Research.” Chicago-Kent Law Review. Vol. 78. 26 Aug 2003. Pgs 997-1031. Accessed on 3/24/08: http://lawreview.kentlaw.edu/articles/78-3/sommers_ellsworth.pdf



[1] Comment noted from Ellsworth, Phoebe-“One Inspiring Jury”. Ellsworth gives a brief summary of American Jury see pg 1394.
[2] In the Diallo case, the unarmed African native Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times by plain clothes New York City police officers. One officer actually emptied one clip, reloaded and emptied a second clip. The case spiked racial protest in New York and around the country. The officers in the case were eventually acquitted.