Lawyers and Jurors: Interrogating Voir Dire Strategies by Analyzing Conversations

This study of individualized jury selection for 792 potentialjurors across 12 North Carolina capital cases, selected with purposive case selection, analyzes the conversations that occur during voir dire to examine the process that produces decisions about who serves on juries. Lawyers question prospective jurors in voir dire partly to gather information about prospective jurors' ability to decide a case without prejudice.Jury selection, however, suffers from what social scientists call demand characteristics. Demand characteristics provide a respondent with clues about the expected response and interfere with effective information gathering. We identified two characteristics that bear on the presence and strength of demand characteristics: the form and tone of the question. We sorted all 8,583 general legal opinion questions along a four-step scale by combining these characteristics. We then used tine-series analyses to examine responses to these questions in sequence. Juror responses were longest and most likely to include an affective utterance when the demand characteristics were weaker, and that loquaciousness and affect fell at each step of the scale. An independent qualitative study replicated these findings, and supported the assertion that length and form are valid measures of quality in this context

A Call to Criminal Courts: Record Rules for Batson

No one paying attention needs to be told the verdict on Batson v. Kentucky.' Batson intended to eliminate the influence of race on jury selection, 2 which is essential both to conducting fair and just trials' and to protecting the reputation of the justice system. 4 Batson failed.' A growing collection of empirical studies documents this failure.6 Dozens of articles analyze the reasons for the failure,' and at least one report documents the humiliation suffered when qualified jurors appear for jury service only to be excluded in a situation that appears to be driven by race.8 Many have called for the abolition of peremptory challenges as the only fix.

Response: Expanding the Record

Scott Phillips and Justin Marceau add a new layer to our understanding of the role of race in the administration of capital punishment. In so doing, they join a very small but hopefully expanding body of literature that is shifting our focus to the act of execution itself.' Indeed, the body of complex studies of the administration of capital punishment stops short of examining decisions about whom the state actually kills with its myriad antecedent decisions. 2 Lifting the veil and sharpening our focus on this final act, alone, makes an important contribution to the literature. But Phillips and Marceau do more than that. They add a layer of evidence to the well-established body of research showing the influence of race on capital punishment.3 In particular, studies across a wide range of jurisdictions have consistently shown that death-eligible defendants convicted of killing at least one white victim are more likely to be charged capitally and ultimately sentenced to death.4 Most simply stated, Phillips and Marceau report that Georgia executed 2.26% (22 out of 972) of all defendants indicted for murder involving at least one white victim compared to 0.13% (2 out of 1,503) of all other defendants between 1973 and 1979.5 This represents a ratio of seventeen-to-one. This mirrors and expands the disparities Baldus and Woodworth reported for unadjusted race-of-victim disparities among all murder and voluntary manslaughter cases. Baldus and Woodworth found that 11% (106 out of 981) of all defendants indicted for murder of at least one white victim received a death sentence, compared to 1 % (20 out of 1,503) of all other death-eligible defendants.6 This represented a ratio of eleven-to-one. The introduction of controls did not meaningfully diminish the disparity in either case

Grounding Criminal Procedure

Article published in the Journal of Gender, Race & Justice

A Stubborn Legacy: The Overwhelming Importance of Race in Jury Selection in 173 Post-Batson North Carolina Capital Trials

Among those who laud its mission, it seems that the only people not disappointed in Batson are those who never expected it to work in the first place. Scholars, judges, and practitioners have criticized the decision for its failure to curb the role of racial stereotypes in jury election. Likewise, previous research in North Carolina has suggested both that race continues to play a role in jury selection and that courts are reluctant to enforce Batson rigorously. Recently, however, the North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation aimed at curing this defect by providing trial courts a unique opportunity to consider the role of race in peremptory challenges from a different angle. The North Carolina Racial Justice Act of 2009 (“RJA”) created a state claim for relief for defendants currently on death row who can show that race was a significant factor in the exercise of peremptory challenges in their cases. A defendant who makes such a showing is entitled to have a death sentence reduced to life without parole. The RJA expressly deems a broad range of evidence relevant by allowing claimants to prove their cases using “statistical evidence or other evidence, including, but not limited to, sworn testimony of attorneys, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, jurors, or other members of the criminal justice system or both.” This Article presents the results of a study undertaken in order to evaluate the potential for statistical evidence to support claims under this part of the RJA. In particular, we examined how prosecutors exercised peremptory challenges in capital trials of all defendants on death row in North Carolina as of July 1, 2010, to assess whether potential jurors’ race played any role in those decisions. We found substantial disparities in which potential jurors prosecutors struck. Over the twenty-year period we examined, prosecutors struck eligible black venire members at about 2.5 times the rate they struck eligible venire members who were not black. These disparities remained consistent over time and across the state, and did not diminish when we controlled for information about venire members that potentially bore on the decision to strike them, such as views on the death penalty or prior experience with crime. In Part II, we review the prior research on jury selection, particularly on the issue of racial bias. In Part III, we present our study methodology and design. Part IV presents the statewide unadjusted racial disparities in prosecutors’ exercise of peremptory strikes, and Part V presents the results of analyses controlling for other factors potentially relevant to jury selection

Report on Jury Selection Study

This report documents the study design, methodology, analysis, and results for a study on the exercise of peremptory challenges during jury selection in trials of all defendants on death row in North Carolina as of July 1, 2010. The study examined how prosecutors exercised peremptory challenges in capital cases to assess whether potential jurors’ race played any role in those decisions. The primary investigators for the study are Barbara O’Brien and Catherine Grosso. Both are associate professors of law at Michigan State University College of Law

Confronting Race: How a Confluence of Social Movements Convinced North Carolina to Go where the McCleskey Court Wouldn’t

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Local History, Practice, and Statistics: A Study on the Influence of Race on the Administration of Capital Punishment in Hamilton County, Ohio (January 1992 - August 2017)

Anthony Amsterdam urged litigators and scholars to focus on individual prosecutors' offices or counties and to identify "a set of local institutions, conventions, and practices which are manifestly the residues of classic Southern apartheid"; to "conduct analyses of the impact of race in the sentencing patterns ... in those specific counties or venues"; and to "investigate, analyze, and prepare evidence of the legacy of apartheid embedded in the counties' political, economic, and social life, particularly as it bears on law enforcement, prosecution, and courthouse customs." The goal, Amsterdam says, is "to build a case not solely on statistical evidence of discrimination but to supplement it with evidence of anecdotes and local custom.

The gap exponent of XXZ model in a transverse field

We have calculated numerically the gap exponent of the anisotropic Heisenberg model in the presence of the transverse magnetic field. We have implemented the modified Lanczos method to obtain the excited states of our model with the same accuracy of the ground state. The coefficient of the leading term in the perturbation expansion diverges in the thermodynamic limit (N --> infinity). We have obtained the relation between this divergence and the scaling behaviour of the energy gap. We have found that the opening of gap in the presence of transverse field scales with a critical exponent which depends on the anisotropy parameter (Delta). Our numerical results are in well agreement with the field theoretical approach in the whole range of the anisotropy parameter, -1 < Delta < 1.Comment: 6 pages and 4 figure