Abstract
The primary influence on the contemporary jury system in the United States is derived from early English colonists who brought their legal institutions to North America. Subsequently, the jury system evolved as an essential ingredient of America’s judicial framework.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See U.S. 90th Congress Senate Report No. 891 1967, and U.S. 90th Congress House Report No. 1076 1968. See also U.S. 1968, Section 1961.
For more detailed discussions, see Boags and Boags (1971); Fukurai and Butler (1991a, b); Fukurai et al. (1991a, b); Hans and Vidmar (1986); “Jury-mandering: federal jury selection and the generation gap” (1973); Levine and Schweber-Koren (1976); Nietzel and Dillehay (1986); and Wrightsman (1987). For various court trials in the U.S. Supreme Court, see Alexander v. Louisiana (405 U.S. 625 1972); Peters v. Kiff (407 U.S. 493 1972); Taylor v. Louisiana (419 U.S. 522 1975); Duren v. Missouri (439 U.S. 357 1979); and City of Mobile, Ala. v. Bolden (466 U.S. 55 1980). In California, see People v. White (43 Cal.3d 740 1954); People v. Newton (8 Cal. App.3d 359, 87 Cal. Rptr. 294 1970); People v. Breckenridge (52 Cal.App.3d. 913, 125 Cal. Rptr. 425 1975); People v. Lewis (74 Cal.App.3d. 633, 141 Cal. Rptr. 614 1977); People v. King (49 Cal. Rptr. 562 1966); People v. Sirhan (7 Cal.3d 258 1978); People v. Wheeler (148 Cal. Rptr. 890 1978); People v. Estrada (155 Cal. Rptr. 731 1979); People v. Grahm (160 Cal. Rptr. 10 1979); and People v. Harris (36 Cal. 3d 36, 201 Cal. Rptr. 782 679 P.2d 433 1984).
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, however, that respondents failed to make out a prima facie case of discrimination in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment with regard to the selection of the grand jury forepersons. As a result, the judgment of the court of appeals, which initially concluded that the respondents had made out a prima facie case, was reversed (Rose v. Mitchell 433 U.S. 545, 1979).
Before 1970, only individual defendants who argued that their right to a fair jury trial had been denied were allowed to raise jury challenges. Carter thus became the first class-action suit to challenge a jury selection process and to be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The terms Hispanic and Spanish-origin population are used interchangeably by the authors in this book. The 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census definition is as follows: Persons of Spanish origin or descent are those who classified themselves in one of the specific Spanish-origin categories listed on the questionnaire—Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban—as well as those who indicated that they were of other Spanish or Hispanic origin. Persons reporting “Other Spanish/Hispanic” origin are those whose origins are from Spain or the Spanish-speaking countries of Central or South America, or they are Spanish-origin persons identifying themselves generally as Spanish, Spanish American, Hispano, Latino and so on. Origin or descent can be viewed as the ancestry, nationality group, lineage, or country in which the person or the person’s parents or ancestors were born before their arrival in the United States. Persons of Spanish origin may be of any race. In our analyses, Spanish surnames defined by the Census Bureau were used to determine the Hispanic population. Jury lists prepared by jury commissioners do not provide racial identifications. Self-identification is used to identify racial and ethnic backgrounds when questionnaires are administered in the jury assembly room (for more detailed discussion on the procedure and the administration of the questionnaires, see Fukurai, 1985).
The likelihood of registering to vote is also influenced by registration laws. Arizona, for instance, has a 50-day residency requirement for registering to vote, whereas Arkansas, Hawaii, Indiana, and many other states do not impose any residency requirement. The residency criterion often imposes a restriction on racial participation on juries, particularly for those with high degrees of geographic and residential mobility. Their high degree of residential mobility makes it less likely that they will register to vote, particularly if there is a strict residency requirement.
Survey questionnaires were sent to potential jurors who were randomly selected from a California County master key list for a period of three months in 1985. The data identified the socioeconomic and demographic profiles of those who were on the master list. More than 1,000 potential jurors were asked various questions about their eligibility to serve on juries. Their step-by-step status in jury selection was carefully monitored, computerized, and analyzed.
Doeringer and Poire (1968) first attempted to explain the persistent unemployment among racial minorities and argued that there are two kinds of labor market, a primary labor market (stability, security, and good pay) and a secondary labor market (with characteristics opposite those of the primary labor market). Specifically, laborers in the secondary labor market are characterized as being the following: (1) racial and ethnic minorities; (2) less educated; (3) lower income earners; (4) youth and the elderly; and (5) women (Edward, Reich, & Gordon, 1975). Edward et al. later incorporated a Marxian flavor into their analysis of the primary and secondary labor markets and posited that, in the late 19th century, because of the growing proletarianization and proliferation of labor conflicts, employers devised an elaborate system of job satisfaction, involving the proliferation of job categories and the ranking of those jobs in a status hierarchy (Edward et al., 1975). Further, Gordon (1972) identified two types of discrimination present in the labor market exercised by employers: (1) simple discrimination (pure prejudice) and (2) statistical discrimination (not instrumental racism, but prejudice based on statistical inferences from past experiences). Thus, racial discrimination is used to sort the pool of potential workers into primary and secondary labor markets.
For a three-year interval, using national data, one study found that 48.0% of blacks had moved, whereas 25.2% of whites had moved (McAllister et al., 1971). During a one-year time period, in Los Angeles County, 49.8% of the age group between 15 and 29 had moved, whereas only 12.8% of those 60 and over had moved. And those mobile groups were predominantly members of racial minorities (Van Arsdol, Maurice, Sabagh, & Butler, 1968).
The length of the current residency was transformed into natural logarithms in order to satisfy the statistical assumption of performing multiple-regression analyses, that is, multivariate normal distributions. For all racial groups, a log-transformed variable of residency increased the proportion of explained variance. It suggested a better fit of linear relationships with an array of independent variables.
See the following for detailed discussions of the size of petit and grand juries in relation to the Sixth Amendment’s right to trial by jury: Robert T. Roper in Law and Society Review (1980, pp. 977-995) and Peter W. Sperlich in Judicature (1980, pp. 262-279).
Rulings in both Johnson v. Louisiana (406 U.S. 356 1972) and Apodaca v. Oregon (406 U.S. 404 1972) were by five-to-four votes.
Postverdict interviews revealed that the first vote on the penalty was 9 to 3 in favor of death. The three jurors who voted against the death penalty were three black jurors. The second vote resulted in a unanimous decision in favor of a life sentence without possibility of parole. For more detailed descriptions of the case, see Chapter 6, “Scientific Jury Selection in Voir Dire: The Hidden Structure of Jury Selection.” Empirical analyses of People v. Harris (36 Cal.3d 36 201, Cal. Rptr. 782 679 P.2d 433 1984) were performed at the University of California, Riverside. In People v. Harris, the motion of the respondent for leave to proceed in forma pauperis was granted; however, the writ of certiorari by the prosection to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied on October 29, 1984. Another example of racially demarcated verdicts is the Jackson case in Long Beach, California. Don Jackson was a police sergeant in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne. The Long Beach case attracted national attention on January 14, 1989, when an NBC crew secretly videotaped a police officer apparently pushing Jackson through a plate glass window after a routine traffic stop. The two defendants in the trial were officers Mark Ramsey, 31, and Mark Dickey, 29. Both were white. These two defendants, who retired at half-pay on stress disability after the arrest, said that they had stopped Jackson because his car was weaving and that he had deliberately provoked them. The jury for the trial consisted of 9 whites, 2 Hispanics, and 1 black. The jury deliberated 3 1/2 days before reporting itself deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of a verdict of not guilty. The jurors accepted the explanation of the officers that they had not purposely pushed Jackson through the window and concluded that Jackson had broken the fall with his elbows, instead of with his head. The jurors also apparently believed a psychologist and former Long Beach police officer, who testified that the two policemen had filed a false report of the incident because they were suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome (Cannon, 1991). Judge James Wright of the municipal court declared a mistrial and granted a defense motion for a dismissal of the misdemeanor charges against the two defendants. Charles Woolery, the only black juror and the juror who voted in favor of conviction, said that the other jurors “didn’t see it like I saw it, you know?... I saw excessive force” (“Mistrial in officers’ beating of motorist in’ 89,” 1991). After the trial, the two defendants, the defense attorneys, and most of the jurors celebrated the verdict together at a long lunch at a waterfront restaurant. The black juror, however, did not join the festivities (Cannon, 1991).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fukurai, H., Butler, E.W., Krooth, R. (1993). The Structural Approach to Racial Inequality in the Jury System and Jury Selection. In: Race and the Jury. The Plenum Series in Crime and Justice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1127-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1127-8_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-1129-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-1127-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive