unambiguously strong, the crime in question is particu-
larly heinous, or the victim is also of the same race as
the juror.
Studies using actual trials have examined juror race
by comparing the subjective jury service experiences
of individuals of different races. Interviews with
jurors from capital cases, for example, have revealed
that White jurors report greater satisfaction with their
jury experiences than do non-White jurors, that Black
jurors are more concerned that the jury may have
made a mistake than their White counterparts, and that
Black jurors are sometimes concerned that the Whites
with whom they served failed to understand Black
defendants’ personal circumstances. Again, though,
most of these studies only examine White and Black
participants, and much remains to be learned regard-
ing the ways in which the experiences and decision
making of jurors varies and converges across different
racial groups.Jury Racial Composition
Although the title of this entry refers to “juries and
race,” the research described to this point has focused
not on the decision making of juries but rather on the
private judgments of individual jurors. Most research
examining race and legal decision making at the group
level is archival in nature. One finding to emerge from
this literature parallels the between-race juror effects
reported above: The greater the proportion of Whites to
non-Whites on a jury, the harsher a jury tends to be
toward non-White defendants. This group-level varia-
tion on the same-race leniency phenomenon has been
observed for Whites and Blacks on capital juries as well
as for Whites and Latinos on nonfelony juries. A
smaller number of experimental studies have produced
comparable findings among investigations of White
and Black jurors, White and Latino jurors, and jurors of
African versus Indian descent.
Whereas archival analyses demonstrate that a
jury’s racial composition is associated with its verdict
tendencies, only experimental data reveal the causal
link between composition and decision. But even
experiments rarely shed much light on the processes
through which such influence occurs. There are mul-
tiple possible explanations for why a jury’s composi-
tion sometimes affects its decision making, and these
possibilities are not mutually exclusive. First, the rela-
tionship between a jury’s composition and its verdict
may simply be the group-level manifestation of the
same-race leniency effect found among individualjurors. That is, to the extent that generalized differ-
ences exist between, for example, the tendencies of
White and Black jurors for a given case, the racial
makeup of a jury is likely to shape the predeliberation
jury vote split and, therefore, also likely to have an
impact on verdict tendencies. In this manner, more
Black jurors in a trial involving a Black defendant
might render a guilty verdict less likely because Black
jurors tend to be more lenient toward Black defen-
dants than are White jurors.
There are additional explanations for the effects of a
jury’s racial composition beyond a simple demo-
graphic, vote-split account. Indeed, archival and exper-
imental investigations have found that a jury’s racial
composition can predict not only verdict tendencies but
also the process and content of its deliberations. Many
legal scholars and judges have argued that a diverse
jury composition leads to a diversity of information
exchanged during deliberations. The assumption under-
lying this proposition is typically that jurors from racial
minority groups tend to bring to the jury room different
perspectives and life experiences than would otherwise
be heard during deliberations of homogeneously White
juries. Though few empirical jury studies have tested
this prediction, research from nonlegal domains has
demonstrated a link between a demographic diversity
and the breadth of perspectives with which a group
approaches a decision. But the effects of jury composi-
tion need not be wholly attributed to the informational
contributions of racial minority jurors. Recent
research—set in both legal and nonlegal contexts—
suggests that a diverse group composition also affects
the judgments and cognitive performances of White
individuals. Specifically, experimental research indi-
cates that the racial composition of a jury can affect
White mock jurors’ verdict preferences, evidence pro-
cessing, and performance during deliberations; even
the mere expectation of deliberating on a diverse jury
has been found to influence the private judgments of
White as well as Black mock jurors.
In sum, research on jury racial composition—like
research on race and legal decision making more
generally—has provided compelling evidence that race
can exert a causal effect on trial outcomes. The precise
mechanisms that account for this influence of racial
composition remain in need of additional empirical
investigation, as do a variety of questions regarding the
generalizability of these findings across different types
of cases and racial groups. Moreover, published
research on this topic does not allow for definitive
assessment of whether a jury’s racial composition wasRace, Impact on Juries——— 669R-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:43 PM Page 669