Beyond reasonable doubt: the impact of politically independent jurors on jury trials in the US

Alessandra Foresta

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: This article evaluates the impact of politically independent jurors on trial verdicts in the US state of North Carolina. To identify the effect of jurors' political affliations, I rely on the day-to-day random variation in the composition of jury pools. The results suggest that the presence of independent jurors decreases the percentage of guilty verdicts. I implement a set of robustness checks, dividing the proportion of independent jurors by gender and by ethnicgroup. The findings suggest that the effect is mainly driven by independent men, and remain negative and significant across different ethnicities. Moreover, I interact the proportion of independent jurors with the ethnicity of defendants, and I remove counties with a high/low number of trials. The results suggest that the effect is stronger for black defendants and that my findings are not driven by outlier counties. Finally, I evaluate the presence of possible political discrimination in the striking patterns. I find that there are no clear strike patterns for independent jurors, although some statistically significant strategic striking is present for Republicans and Democrats alike.

Keywords: Jury; Peremptory challenges; Political Affiliation; Independent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 K14 K40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-pol
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