Down to the Last Strike: The Effect of the Jury Lottery on Criminal Convictions

Scott Kostyshak and Neel U. Sukhatme

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Abstract: How much does luck matter to a criminal defendant in a jury trial? We use rich data on jury selection to causally estimate how parties who are randomly assigned a less favorable jury (as proxied by whether their attorneys exhaust their peremptory strikes) fare at trial. Our novel identification strategy is unique in that it captures variation in juror predisposition coming from variables unobserved by the econometrician but observed by attorneys. We find that criminal defendants who lose the "jury lottery" are more likely to be convicted than their similarly-situated counterparts, with a significant increase (~19 percentage points) for Black defendants. Our results suggest that a considerable number of cases would result in different verdicts if retried with new (counterfactual) random draws of the jury pool, raising concerns about the variance of justice in the criminal legal system.

Date: 2025-05
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