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Attorney empowerment in Voir Dire and the racial composition of juries

Author

Listed:
  • Lehmann, Jee-Yeon
  • Smith, Jeremy
Abstract
Giving attorneys more power in the voir dire (jury selection) process may allow them to 1) find grounds for dismissal of jurors whom they wish to strike on a priori grounds; 2) acquire information that enables them to identify favorably-inclined jurors more precisely; or both. Attorneys who are more skilled can better use such increased power to retain the jurors they prefer. We show theoretically that, because defense attorneys prefer non-white jurors a priori, the interaction of empowerment and defense attorney skill should produce juries with a greater proportion of non-whites if only the first mechanism is operative, but need not have this effect if the second is operative. We then examine these issues using a detailed dataset on all non-capital felony trials in four large and diverse counties over a two-year period. We find that skilled and empowered attorneys can indeed stack juries by retaining jurors predisposed to their side at a greater rate, and that the distribution of relative attorney skill in our data is such that defendants benefit on average. However, we find that empowerment has a small and insignificant impact on the racial composition of the seated jury, regardless of attorney skill.

Suggested Citation

  • Lehmann, Jee-Yeon & Smith, Jeremy, 2011. "Attorney empowerment in Voir Dire and the racial composition of juries," MPRA Paper 36338, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:36338
    as

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    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/36338/1/MPRA_paper_36338.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Feddersen, Timothy & Pesendorfer, Wolfgang, 1998. "Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts under Strategic Voting," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 92(1), pages 23-35, March.
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    4. Lehmann, Jee-Yeon, 2011. "Job assignment and promotion under statistical discrimination: evidence from the early careers of lawyers," MPRA Paper 33466, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Moses Shayo & Asaf Zussman, 2011. "Judicial Ingroup Bias in the Shadow of Terrorism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 126(3), pages 1447-1484.
    6. Shari Seidman Diamond & Destiny Peery & Francis J. Dolan & Emily Dolan, 2009. "Achieving Diversity on the Jury: Jury Size and the Peremptory Challenge," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 6(3), pages 425-449, September.
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Discrimination; Voir Dire; Jury; Attorney Empowerment; Race;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • K0 - Law and Economics - - General
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games

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