[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/duk/dukeec/12-08.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

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

Author

Listed:
  • Shamena Anwar
  • Patrick Bayer
  • Randi Hjalmarsson
Abstract
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.

Suggested Citation

  • Shamena Anwar & Patrick Bayer & Randi Hjalmarsson, 2012. "A Fair and Impartial Jury? The Role of Age in Jury Selection and Trial Outcomes," Working Papers 12-08, Duke University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:duk:dukeec:12-08
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2014963
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Philippe, Arnaud, 2017. "Does introducing lay people in criminal courts affect judicial decisions? Evidence from French reform," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 1-15.
    2. Philippe, Arnaud, 2017. "Do jurors and professional judges differ in their treatment of crime?: Evidence from French reform," TSE Working Papers 17-763, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    3. Mark Schweizer, 2013. "The civil standard of proof – what is it, actually?," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2013_12, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.

    More about this item

    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:duk:dukeec:12-08. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Department of Economics Webmaster (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://econ.duke.edu/ .

    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.