Exclusion of Extreme Jurors and Minority Representation: The Effect of Jury Selection Procedures

Abstract

We compare two established jury selection procedures meant to safeguard against the inclusion of biased jurors, that are also perceived as causing minorities to be under-represented in juries. The Strike and Replace procedure presents potential jurors one-by-one to the parties, while the Struck procedure presents all potential jurors before the parties exercise vetoes. In equilibrium, Struck more effectively excludes extreme jurors than Strike and Replace but leads to a worse representation of minorities. Simulations suggest that the advantage of Struck in terms of excluding extremes is sizable in a wide range of cases. In contrast, Strike and Replace only provides a significantly better representation of minorities if the minority and majority are heavily polarized. The size of these effects quantitatively depends on parameters. When parameters are estimated to match the parties’ selection of jurors by race with jury-selection data from Mississippi in trials against black defendants, the procedures’ outcomes are substantially different, and the size of the trade-off between objectives can be quantitatively evaluated.

Keywords: Jury selection, Peremptory challenge, Minority representation, Gender representation

JEL Classification: K40, K14, J14, J16