Study: White Men Most Influential on Capital juries - and That's Bad News for Black Defendants

BY Brendan Kirby
23 December 2014

Two white women on a jury deciding the fate of convicted murderer Mitchell Hall were expressing doubts about whether he should get the death penalty when an older white man on the panel took control of deliberations.

Before the forewoman had finished her explanation of why she hoped the defendant might one day positively influence his children, the death penalty advocate cut her off.

"I would refute that completely," he said, before launching into a long argument in favor of execution.

By the time he had finished, the holdouts for life-without-parole prison sentences had flipped, and the jury rendered a unanimous verdict in favor of death.

The case was not real, and the jurors were residents of a central California county paid $40 to participate in a study by University of California-Irvine criminology professor Mona Lynch and University of California-Santa Cruz psychology professor Craig Haney. The study, published this month in the Journal of the American Bar Foundation, indicates that emotion plays a central role in death penalty deliberations. It also draws three main conclusions:

White men on juries are most likely to argue forcefully for their position - whether it is life in prison or the death penalty, and are more likely to be elected jury foremen.

When jurors change their minds during deliberations, it usually is to switch from life to death.

Race plays an important, if subtle role. White male jurors were more likely to empathize with white defendants and more likely to discount mitigating factors in cases involving black defendants.

"In the case of capital jury decision making, our findings suggest that emotions significantly shaped outcomes and the very processes by which they were reached," the study states. "Indeed, they appeared to be inseparable from the critically important judgments that capital jurors were called on to make."

Devising the study

The study reaches similar conclusions to previous research, based on interviews with people who had served on capital juries, that demonstrated the influence of race on deliberations.</

Lynch and Haney constructed their study by dividing participants into 100 juries of four to seven members. They told jurors that the defendant in the case they would review already had been convicted of capital murder and that they were to consider one of two options - the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole.

They then watched a videotape of the penalty phase of a trial based on a real California case. In each case, the victim's name was Mitchell Hall and the victim was named John Emerson. The races of the defendant and victim varied from panel to panel, but the facts were the same otherwise.

The study found that overall, deliberations produced an 11 percent increase in jurors opting for death compared with pre-deliberation preferences that jurors marked after watching the penalty phase. Among the 134 participants who changed their minds during deliberations, about three quarters moved from life to death. According to the study, several jurors did not even admit their original positions in favor of life in prison that they marked on their questionnaires.

White men were most successful at swaying other jurors to their point of view, according to the study. Also, juries with higher proportions of white men had a greater tendency toward racial disparities in sentencing.

"In the present analysis, we found that white male jurors often asserted emotional authority in the deliberations in two distinct ways: first in terms of asserting their own emotional responses and, second, by policing the emotional expressions of others," the authors wrote. "Moreover, this authority appeared to be deployed differentially as a function of the defendant's race."

White men most forceful

White male jurors were more likely to be forceful advocates for life when the defendant was white - especially when the victim was black. In one case, a white man on a jury distinguished the defendant from other murder defendants.

"So Mitchell, as compared to your generic gangster, he's a guy that is really going to suffer in prison, this is going to be a tremendous pain to him and it's going to be with him for his whole life," he said.

On the other hand, white men on the mock juries were more likely to shut down fellow jurors who expressed empathy for black defendants. In some cases, white male jurors viewed a white defendant's children as a mitigating factor in his favor while other when men viewed the black defendant's children as a sign of irresponsibility.

In one case, a white male juror used a racist slur during deliberations. While that was unusual, the study's authors wrote, "race remained a subtext" that helped shape the discussions in most of the other cases.

"Finally, our analysis of these deliberations underscores the apparent intractability of racism in capital decision making," Lynch and Haney wrote. "It suggests that racial bias can operate emotionally as well as cognitively."