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Racial Differences in Jury Behavior

Ugwuegbu (1979) reports on two experiments, one conducted with a black population and the other with a white population, designed to assess the behavior of jurors in the decision-making process to ascertain racial differences in how this process is effected. Much research has been conducted on the biasing variables such as those associated with characteristics of the defendant or those associated with characteristics of the juror. Much of the research indicates that the race of the defendant and of the victim may influence juror judgment.

The experiments reported by Ugwuegbu (1979) were simulated juror evaluations of a rape case. The racial identities of the victim and the defendant and the amount of evidence presented to the jurors were varied. A number of hypotheses were tested in this experiment, including the idea that a racially dissimilar defendant would be accorded more negative and harsher evaluation than a similar defendant, that interracial rape would be more punitively punished than interracial rape when the victim is the same race as the juror, and that with ambiguous evidence, the difference in punitiveness between racially similar and racially dissimilar defendants would be especially strong.

The subjects consisted of 256 white undergraduate students from introductory psychology courses at Midwestern University, and they were run in five different sessions of nearly equal numbers of males and females. The experimental conditions were run simultaneously in each session. A jury trial was presented to each as a case study, to be read along with instructions concerning deliberations. The subjects read a transcript of a simulated rape case which occurred on the campus, and racial identities were varied for different jurors. Various evidentiary conditions were varied in the different transcripts as well--whether the victim could identify the attacker, for instance, along with other evidence.

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Racial Differences in Jury Behavior. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:27, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701542.html