TY - JOUR AU - Anwar,Shamena AU - Bayer,Patrick AU - Hjalmarsson,Randi TI - The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 16366 PY - 2010 Y2 - September 2010 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16366 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16366.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Shamena Anwar Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Ave Heinz College, Hamburg Hall Room 2116D Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Tel: 714-913-5172 E-Mail: shamena@andrew.cmu.edu Patrick Bayer Department of Economics Duke University 213 Social Sciences Durham, NC 27708 Tel: 919/660-1832 E-Mail: patrick.bayer@duke.edu Randi Hjalmarsson Queen Mary University of London School of Economics and Finance Mile End Road London E1 4NS, UK E-Mail: r.hjalmarsson@qmul.ac.uk AB - This paper examines the impact of jury racial composition on trial outcomes using a unique data set of felony trials in Florida between 2000 and 2010. We utilize a research design that exploits day-to-day variation in the composition of the jury pool to isolate quasi-random variation in the composition of the seated jury, finding evidence that: (i) juries formed from all-white jury pools convict black defendants significantly (16 percentage points) more often than white defendants and (ii) this gap in conviction rates is entirely eliminated when the jury pool includes at least one black member. The impact of jury race is much greater than what a simple correlation of the race of the seated jury and conviction rates would suggest. These findings imply that the application of justice is highly uneven and raise obvious concerns about the fairness of trials in jurisdictions with a small proportion of blacks in the jury pool. ER -