Are Juries Racially Discriminatory? Evidence from the Race-Blind Charging of Grand Jury Defendants with and without Racially Distinctive Names

Mark Hoekstra, Suhyeon Oh and Meradee Tangvatcharapong

No 34106, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We implement five different tests of whether grand juries, which are drawn from a representative cross-section of the public, discriminate against Black defendants when deciding to prosecute felony cases. Three tests exploit that while jurors do not directly observe defendant race, jurors do observe the “Blackness” of defendants’ names. All three tests—an audit-study-style test, a traditional outcome-based test, and a test that estimates racial bias using blinded/unblinded comparisons after purging omitted variable bias—indicate juries do not discriminate based on race. Two additional tests indicate racial bias explains at most 0.3 percent of the Black-White felony conviction gap.

JEL-codes: J15 J71 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
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