Jury composition measurably changes racial bias in death sentencing.

Evidence

Early research used death-qualified juries as proxies for nondiverse (at least in terms of race/ethnicity) juries, since death-qualified juries tend to contain a lower proportion of minorities and women than typical juries do (Fitzgerald & Ellsworth, 1984). As predicted, death-qualified juries were more likely to exhibit racial bias in decisions than were juries not death-qualified (Cowan, Thompson, & Ellsworth, 1984). More recent research documented that a higher proportion of White men on juries corresponded with an increase in racially biased decisions (Lynch & Haney, 2011). For the White defendant, the number of White men on the jury had no effect on the sentencing decisions. In cases with a Black defendant, however, juries with two or more White men were significantly more likely to impose a death sentence than were those with fewer than two White men. Experimentally increasing the racial/ethnic diversity of juries decreases the degree to which juries punish minority defendants (Bernard, 1979; Lipton, 1983; Perez, Hosch, Ponder, & Trejo, 1993). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 894

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supplies measured-bias evidence for the reader’s project on group composition and bias divergence; relates to the sincere-conviction-vs-measured-bias gap in institutional settings.
• ADDENDUM: Empirical institutional context for bias in the legal/criminal justice system beyond explicit professed attitudes.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 894