Research on Jury Bias

Jury Bias

With jury bias we examined that the perspective taking, victim impact statements and race of the victim had no main effects with ps > 0.26 and no significant interactions either with ps > 0.64.

Jury Race

The race of the jury was divided into white and non-white participants. An ANOVA was then run with perspective taking, victim impact statements, and race of the victim as the between-participants factors to test against empathy felt for the defendant, for the victim, for the victim’s significant others.

White participants. We observed that there was a main effect with the race of the jury and the empathy felt by the jury for the victim. The empathy felt by the jury for the white victim when the jury was white (M = 5.781, SD = 0.243) was significantly higher than the empathy felt by the jury when the jury non-white (M = 4.676, SD = 0.449) with F(1,49) = 6.256, p = 0.016. No other main effects or significant two way or three way interaction were was observed between the factors, ps > 0.08.

Non-White participants. A similar result was not replicated when the empathy of the victim was black. There were no main effects with ps > 0.20 or significant interactions observed with ps > 0.06. One of the possible explanations for this is that most of the participants in the participant pool were white and from the non-white participant pool only some percentage was black.

Racial Attitude

Explicit Racial Attitude. No main effects or significant two way or three way interactions in the explicit anti-black racial attitude of a participant were observed. A significant interaction was observed between the victim impact statements and the race of the victims on the pro-black explicit racial attitude with F(1,107) = 4.916, p = 0.029. Wi...

... middle of paper ...

... of the juror’s and their sentencing or decision making in our study but further research could be carried out solely into how political attitude could also influence the jury-decision making.

In conclusion, we have seen that the race of the victim and the emotionality of the victim impact statements highly affects the jury’s empathy and therefore might influence their decision making. Understanding the interaction between the racial in-group/out-group and empathy may allow defense attorneys to lead jurors for harsher punishments for out-group racial groups and more lenient punishments for in-groups by playing on juror empathy and thus putting emotions before law and reason. Consequently, in any capital punishment case, race of the victim and race of the jury, could be the difference between life and death for a defendant and therefore needs to be studied further.