Juror bias and race

Implicit bias tests among jurors

 * Mitchell 2005 analyzed data from 34 studies in which people acted as jurors and voted on whether a given defendant was guilty.  It was found that whites exhibit nearly no racial bias in such decisions while black people exhibit an in-group bias that is 15 times larger than the minuscule bias seen among whites.
 * With respect to deciding sentence length, racial bias among white people was still practically insignificant, while the bias among black people was 7.6 times greater.
 * Assuming normal distributions, these values imply that white people favor harsher sentence lengths for the average black criminal than they do for 54% of white criminals while black people favor harsher sentences for the average white criminal than they do 77% of black criminals. (50% would imply absolutely no bias).
 * Biasjuror.pngSentencelast.jpg
 * Verdict.jpgSentencing.jpg


 * For verdict decisions, white participants exhibited no practically significant bias while black participants exhibited an in-group bias equivalent to a .43 standard deviation difference in treatment based on race.
 * With respect to sentencing decisions, we once against see basically no discrimination among white people and a pro-black bias among black participants equal to an absurdly strong .73 standard deviations.

Burge and Johnson found that black Americans favor harsher punishments for white on black crime than black on white crime.