The Process is the Punishment: Juror Demographics and Case Administration in State Courts

Lee, Jean N.

doi:10.1093/aler/ahx010

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…A recent pair of studies , 2014 provides causal evidence of biases in U.S. jury decisions by exploiting random aspects of the assignment of juries to felony cases in two counties in Florida. Specifically, these studies take advantage of the random variation in the day-to-day composition of the jury pool from which the jury is chosen.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…SeeDiamond and Rose (2005) for a review of studies using data from jury trials. More recently,Lehmann and Smith (2013) look at the impact of a variety of seated juror characteristics (race, gender, age, religiousness, education, and income) on trial outcomes andLee (2014) shows that states that switched from key-man jury selection procedures to more random selection procedures, which were meant to increase black representation on juries, saw a resulting drop in the share of non-whites newly admitted to prison. 2 In the absence of data from real trials, researchers have also conducted mock trials, but the resulting conclusions are limited by both the simplifications made for experimental expediency and the substantially lower stakes compared to real criminal trials.…”

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Politics in the Courtroom: Political Ideology and Jury Decision Making

Anwar

Bayer

Hjalmarsson

2018

Journal of the European Economic Association

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This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed nämndemän) to make three contributions to the literature on jury decision-making: (i) an assessment of whether systematic biases exist in the Swedish nämndemän system, (ii) causal evidence on the impact of juror political party on verdicts, and (iii) an empirical examination of the role of peer effects in jury decisionmaking. The results reveal a number of systematic biases: convictions for young defendants and those with distinctly Arabic names increase substantially when they are randomly assigned jurors from the far-right (nationalist) Swedish Democrat party, whereas convictions in cases with a female victim increase markedly when they are assigned jurors from the far-left (feminist) Vänster party. An analysis of peer effects implies that jurors from the far-left and far-right parties influence the votes of nämndemän from centrist parties in a way that is consistent with their respective party platforms. This analysis also suggests that at least some of these peer effects result in genuine changes of opinions (affecting trial outcomes), rather than vote changes motivated solely to reach unanimous decisions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Politics in the Courtroom: Political Ideology and Jury Decision Making

Anwar

Bayer

Hjalmarsson

2018

Journal of the European Economic Association

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Political Discrimination in the Law Review Selection Process

2018

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The career trajectories of law professors and the dissemination of knowledge depend on the publication decisions of law review editors. However, these publication decisions are shrouded in mystery, and little is known about the factors that affect them. In this article, we investigate one potentially important factor: political ideology. To do so, we match data on the political ideology of student editors from 15 top law reviews over a twenty-year period to data on the political ideology of the authors of accepted articles. We find that editors accept articles in part because of shared political ideology with authors. That is, conservative editors are more likely to accept articles written by conservative authors, and liberal editors are more likely to accept articles written by liberal authors. We then investigate potential explanations for this ideological discrimination. One possibility is that student editors simply have a preference for publishing articles that promote their political ideology. Another possibility is that student editors are objectively better at assessing the contribution of articles written by authors with shared ideology. We find evidence that the ideological discrimination is driven by student editors' superior ability to ascertain the quality of articles that match their own ideology.

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Politics in the Courtroom: Political Ideology and Jury Decision Making

Anwar

Bayer

Hjalmarsson

2015

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This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed nämndemän) to make three contributions to the literature on jury decision-making: (i) an assessment of whether systematic biases exist in the Swedish nämndemän system, (ii) causal evidence on the impact of juror political party on verdicts, and (iii) an empirical examination of the role of peer effects in jury decision-making. The results reveal a number of systematic biases: convictions for young defendants and those with distinctly Arabic sounding names increase substantially when they are randomly assigned jurors from the far-right (nationalist) Swedish Democrat party, while convictions in cases with a female victim increase markedly when they are assigned jurors from the far-left (feminist) Vänster party. The results also indicate the presence of peer effects, with jurors from both the far-left and far-right parties drawing the votes of their more centrist peers towards their positions. Peer effects take the form of both sway effects, where jurors influence the opinions of their closest peers in a way that can impact trial outcomes, and dissent aversion, where jurors switch non-pivotal votes so that the decision is unanimous.

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The Process is the Punishment: Juror Demographics and Case Administration in State Courts

Cited by 3 publications

References 25 publications

Politics in the Courtroom: Political Ideology and Jury Decision Making

Politics in the Courtroom: Political Ideology and Jury Decision Making

Political Discrimination in the Law Review Selection Process

Politics in the Courtroom: Political Ideology and Jury Decision Making

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