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Results for juror selection

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Author: Moore, Marla

Title: Report to the Georgia Jury Composition Committee

Summary: In 2003, the Georgia Supreme Court established the Jury Composition Committee under the direction of Justice Hugh Thompson. The Committee is comprised of judges, defense and prosecuting attorneys, court administrators, and court clerks. The Committee’s charge was to evaluate whether Georgia can reform the current juror selection system (balanced box) and adopt an inclusive statewide source. The Committee investigated three questions: 1. Is the American Bar Association (ABA) “inclusiveness standard” a feasible alternative to the balanced box protocol? The ABA standard states that if the source list includes at least 85% of eligible adults, the list is deemed inclusive because it reflects a fair cross-section of potential jurors. If jurors are randomly sampled from this list, the resulting list should not systematically exclude any cognizable groups, and therefore should be inclusive. 2. Is it feasible to compile a centralized, statewide source list in a cost-effective manner, and to distribute the resulting list to Jury Commissioners for review and verification? 3. What additional procedures, policies, data, or technology are required to compile an inclusive source list? The Committee study used Georgia’s statewide voter registration and driver’s license databases, which together consist of approximately 17 million records. These two lists are the only statutorily mandated jury source lists. Although clerks can augment these sources with local lists, evidence in other states suggests that these lists, when cleaned and merged, can produce an inclusive source list using the ABA inclusiveness standard. The Committee examined ten pilot counties in the Phase I study (2008) to identify challenges and solutions required to implement an inclusive source list. This study concluded that an inclusive list is feasible if the Committee could remedy data quality problems with driver’s license records. To resolve these problems, the General Assembly amended existing Georgia statutes governing the data elements that the Georgia Department of Driver Services (DDS) can release to the county clerks. This brief report describes the Phase II study that examined Georgia’s 159 counties to assess whether it is possible to compile a defensible statewide source list that represents a fair cross-section of Georgia counties, and therefore meets the inclusiveness standard established by the ABA. This report is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 2 describes the ABA standard and considers the inclusiveness versus balanced box approach to jury selection. Chapter 3 addresses Georgia’s statutorily authorized jury source lists. Chapter 4 describes the data quality and maintenance issues associated with the voter and driver’s license databases, and examines potential solutions. Chapter 5 outlines the challenges of merging voter registration and driver’s license data. Chapter 6 summarizes the proposed process and rules to improve data quality and to create an inclusive source list. Chapter 7 describes the method for identifying and removing duplicate records once voter and driver databases are merged. Finally, Chapter 8 provides a summary of the impact the improvements have on an inclusive source list and whether the resulting source list is inclusive and represents a fair cross-section.

Details: Atlanta: Georgia Adminitrative Office of the Courts and Applied Research Services, Inc., 2010. 66p.

Source: Internet Resource: Accessed September 1, 2011 at: http://ars-corp.com/_view/PDF_Files/ReporttotheGeorgiaJuryCompositionCommittee2010.pdf

Year: 2010

Country: United States

URL: http://ars-corp.com/_view/PDF_Files/ReporttotheGeorgiaJuryCompositionCommittee2010.pdf

Shelf Number: 122587

Keywords:
Courts (Georgia)
Juries
Juror Selection

Author: Anwar, Shamena

Title: A Fair and Impartial Jury? The Role of Age in Jury Selection and Trial Outcomes

Summary: This paper uses data from over 700 felony trials in Sarasota and Lake Counties in Florida from 2000-2010 to examine the role of age in jury selection and trial outcomes. The results of the analysis imply that prosecutors are more likely to use their peremptory challenges to exclude younger members of the jury pool, while defense attorneys exclude older potential jurors. Having established that age has an important role in jury selection, the paper employs a research design that isolates the effect of the random variation in the age composition of the pool of eligible jurors called for jury duty to examine the causal impact of age on trial outcomes. Consistent with the jury selection patterns, the empirical evidence implies that older jurors are indeed more likely to convict. These results are robust to the inclusion of a broad set of controls for the racial and gender composition of the jury and a series of county, time, and judge fixed effects; almost identical effects are estimated separately for each county. These findings have implications for the role that the institution of peremptory challenges has on a defendant’s right to a fair trial and to an eligible citizen’s rights to serve on a jury.

Details: Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012. 26p.

Source: NBER Working Ppaer 17887: Internet Resource: Accessed March 10, 2012 at http://www.nber.org/papers/w17887.pdf?new_window=1

Year: 2012

Country: United States

URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17887.pdf?new_window=1

Shelf Number: 124439

Keywords:
Demographic Trends
Juries
Juror Selection