IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/36338.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Attorney empowerment in Voir Dire and the racial composition of juries

Author

Listed:
  • Lehmann, Jee-Yeon
  • Smith, Jeremy

Abstract

Giving attorneys more power in the voir dire (jury selection) process may allow them to 1) find grounds for dismissal of jurors whom they wish to strike on a priori grounds; 2) acquire information that enables them to identify favorably-inclined jurors more precisely; or both. Attorneys who are more skilled can better use such increased power to retain the jurors they prefer. We show theoretically that, because defense attorneys prefer non-white jurors a priori, the interaction of empowerment and defense attorney skill should produce juries with a greater proportion of non-whites if only the first mechanism is operative, but need not have this effect if the second is operative. We then examine these issues using a detailed dataset on all non-capital felony trials in four large and diverse counties over a two-year period. We find that skilled and empowered attorneys can indeed stack juries by retaining jurors predisposed to their side at a greater rate, and that the distribution of relative attorney skill in our data is such that defendants benefit on average. However, we find that empowerment has a small and insignificant impact on the racial composition of the seated jury, regardless of attorney skill.

Suggested Citation

  • Lehmann, Jee-Yeon & Smith, Jeremy, 2011. "Attorney empowerment in Voir Dire and the racial composition of juries," MPRA Paper 36338, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:36338
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/36338/1/MPRA_paper_36338.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Shari Seidman Diamond & Destiny Peery & Francis J. Dolan & Emily Dolan, 2009. "Achieving Diversity on the Jury: Jury Size and the Peremptory Challenge," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 6(3), pages 425-449, September.
    2. Steven J. Brams & Morton D. Davis, 1978. "Optimal Jury Selection: A Game-Theoretic Model for the Exercise of Peremptory Challenges," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 26(6), pages 966-991, December.
    3. Feddersen, Timothy & Pesendorfer, Wolfgang, 1998. "Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts under Strategic Voting," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 92(1), pages 23-35, March.
    4. Neilson, William S. & Winter, Harold, 2000. "Bias and the economics of jury selection," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(2), pages 223-250, June.
    5. Morris H. Degroot & Joseph B. Kadane, 1980. "Optimal Challenges for Selection," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 28(4), pages 952-968, August.
    6. Joseph Kadane & Christopher Stone & Garrick Wallstrom, 1999. "The Donation Paradox for Peremptory Challenges," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 47(2), pages 139-155, October.
    7. Arthur Roth & Joseph B. Kadane & Morris H. Degroot, 1977. "Optimal Peremptory Challenges in Trials by Juries: A Bilateral Sequential Process," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 25(6), pages 901-919, December.
    8. Lehmann, Jee-Yeon, 2011. "Job assignment and promotion under statistical discrimination: evidence from the early careers of lawyers," MPRA Paper 33466, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Moses Shayo & Asaf Zussman, 2011. "Judicial Ingroup Bias in the Shadow of Terrorism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 126(3), pages 1447-1484.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Francis X. Flanagan, 2015. "Peremptory Challenges and Jury Selection," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 58(2), pages 385-416.
    2. Alpern, Steve & Gal, Shmuel & Solan, Eilon, 2010. "A sequential selection game with vetoes," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 68(1), pages 1-14, January.
    3. Steve Alpern & Shmuel Gal, 2009. "Analysis and design of selection committees: a game theoretic secretary problem," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 38(3), pages 377-394, November.
    4. Neilson, William S. & Winter, Harold, 2005. "The Elimination of Hung Juries: Retrials and Nonunanimous Verdicts," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 1-19, March.
    5. Steve Alpern & Bo Chen, 2017. "Who should cast the casting vote? Using sequential voting to amalgamate information," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 83(2), pages 259-282, August.
    6. Francesco Parisi & Ram Singh, 2024. "Decisiveness, Correctness and Accuracy in Criminal Adjudication," Working papers 350, Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics.
    7. Joseph Kadane & Christopher Stone & Garrick Wallstrom, 1999. "The Donation Paradox for Peremptory Challenges," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 47(2), pages 139-155, October.
    8. Andrea Moro & Martin Van der Linden, 2021. "Exclusion of Extreme Jurors and Minority Representation: The Effect of Jury Selection Procedures," Papers 2102.07222, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2023.
    9. Alfredo Di Tillio & Marco Ottaviani & Peter Norman Sørensen, 2021. "Strategic Sample Selection," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(2), pages 911-953, March.
    10. Steven J. Brams & Todd R. Kaplan, 2004. "Dividing the Indivisible," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 16(2), pages 143-173, April.
    11. Mujcic, Redzo & Frijters, Paul, 2013. "Still Not Allowed on the Bus: It Matters If You're Black or White!," IZA Discussion Papers 7300, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    12. Simona Fabrizi & Steffen Lippert & Addison Pan & Matthew Ryan, 2022. "A theory of unanimous jury voting with an ambiguous likelihood," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 93(3), pages 399-425, October.
    13. Bhattacharya, Sourav & Duffy, John & Kim, Sun-Tak, 2014. "Compulsory versus voluntary voting: An experimental study," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 111-131.
    14. Becker, Gary S. & Rubinstein, Yona, 2011. "Fear and the response to terrorism: an economic analysis," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 121740, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    15. Quement, Mark T. Le & Marcin, Isabel, 2020. "Communication and voting in heterogeneous committees: An experimental study," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 174(C), pages 449-468.
    16. Katharina Werner & Ahmed Skali, 2023. "Violent Conflict and Parochial Trust: Lab-in-the-Field and Survey Evidence," HiCN Working Papers 404, Households in Conflict Network.
    17. Schaefer, Alexander, 2021. "Rationality, uncertainty, and unanimity: an epistemic critique of contractarianism," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 37(1), pages 82-117, March.
    18. Shmuel Leshem, 2010. "The benefits of a right to silence for the innocent," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 41(2), pages 398-416, June.
    19. Benjamin Marx & Vincent Pons & Tavneet Suri, 2021. "Diversity and Team Performance in a Kenyan Organization," NBER Working Papers 28655, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Taiga Tsubota & Masahide Horita, 2022. "What Forms the Trajectory of Social Reforms? The Roles of Decision Rules and Communication under Epistemic Uncertainty," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 31(1), pages 187-212, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Discrimination; Voir Dire; Jury; Attorney Empowerment; Race;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • K0 - Law and Economics - - General
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:36338. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.