STUDIES: Death-Penalty Jury Selection ​“Whitewashes” Juries and is Biased Towards Death

As support for the death penalty has declined in America, the process of “death-qualification”—which screens potential jurors in death-penalty cases based upon their views about capital punishment—produces increasingly unrepresentative juries from which African Americans are disproportionately excluded and, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, increasingly biases juries in favor of conviction and death sentences.

Death-qualification, the researchers say, “systematically ‘whitewashes’ the capital eligible pool [and] leaves behind a subgroup [of jurors] that does not represent the views of its community.”

Professor Mona Lynch (pictured, l.) of University of California-Irvine’s Department of Criminology, Law, and Society, and Professor Craig Haney (pictured, r.) of University of California-Santa Cruz’s Department of Psychology conducted two surveys of jurors in Solano County, California—which has the highest concentration of African Americans in the state—18 months apart to examine how racial differences in death-penalty opinions affect the composition of capital juries. As support for the death penalty has declined in recent years, the gap between the views of Whites (and particularly White males) and the views of African Americans and women has grown, exacerbating what the authors call “tension between the constitutionally sanctioned practice of death-qualification and a capital defendant’s constitutional right to be tried by a representative and unbiased jury.”

The researchers asked respondents about their views on the death penalty, and about whether those views would interfere with their ability to apply the law in a death-penalty trial, which would make them legally excludable from a jury. They found that the death-qualification process excluded a far greater percentage of people who said they opposed the death penalty than said they supported it, and that the rate of exclusion was even more disproportionate for African Americans. And while nearly equal percentages of White men and women were excluded by the process, the women who were excluded were much more likely to oppose capital punishment.

The death-qualification process, they said, also contributed to racially disparate use of discretionary jury strikes by the prosecution by providing a facially race-neutral reason for disproportionately excluding African-American jurors. When the researchers asked jurors about their attitudes towards potentially aggravating and mitigating evidence, they found that a majority of White jurors—and particularly White male jurors—disregarded most mitigating evidence that would be offered to spare a defendant’s a life and that a significant minority of these jurors inappropriately viewed many of these mitigating factors as reasons to impose a death sentence. They also found that White respondents “were significantly more receptive to aggravating evidence and were more inclined to weigh these specific items in favor of a death sentence compared to African American respondents.”

The process, they said, “creat[es] a jury whose members are unusually hostile to mitigation,” which may “functionally undermine” the fair consideration of a capital defendant’s case in mitigation. “This risk,” the authors wrote, “is particularly high in cases involving African American defendants, especially where white men dominate the jury.” The overall result, they said, is that, “[i]n a county in California where support for and opposition to capital punishment are beginning to approach parity, death qualification still has the potential to produce jury pools that are significantly more likely to favor the death penalty.”