The Effect of Own-Gender Juries on Conviction Rates
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Date
2018-07-11
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Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University
Abstract
The right to an impartial jury is the cornerstone of the U.S. justice system and is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, but are these juries truly impartial, or do they favor defendants who are similar to themselves? In PERC working paper 1803, PERC’s Rex Grey Professor Mark Hoekstra and co-author Brittany Street study whether gender matches between jurors and defendants affect criminal conviction rates using administrative data on the juror selection process and trial proceedings for two large counties in Florida. Findings show that own-gender juries result in significantly lower conviction rates on drug charges, though no evidence of effects were found for other charges. Estimates indicate that a one standard deviation increase in expected own-gender jurors (and estimated 10 percentage points) results in a 19 percentage point reduction in conviction rates on drug charges and a 13 percentage point decline in the likelihood of being sentenced to at least some jail time.
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PublicFinance
Keywords
1803, Juries, Gender, Bias, Criminal, Justice, Jury, Juror, PublicFinance