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ABSTRACT
Today, nineteen million American citizens bear the mark of a felony conviction, far more than in any prior era. With that mark comes a host of record-based restrictions that curtail access to various political, social, and civic institutions. One such restriction impacts convicted felons’ eligibility for jury service. Forty-nine states, the federal government, and the District of Columbia statutorily limit convicted felons’ opportunities to serve as jurors. Justifying these restrictions, lawmakers and courts suggest that convicted felons, if allowed to serve, would diminish the quality of the deliberation process. This exploratory mock jury experiment is the first to assess jury deliberations that include felon-jurors, comparing (1) homogenous juries comprised entirely of non-felon-jurors to diverse juries comprised of both non-felon and felon-jurors and (2) non-felon-jurors to felon-jurors. Results suggest that on theoretically derived measures of deliberation structure, deliberation content, and juror perceptions, diverse juries performed as well as homogenous juries. Data also tend to demonstrate few statistically significant differences between felon-jurors and non-felon-jurors. Notably, on measures of novel case facts covered and time spoken as a proportion of deliberation duration, felon-jurors outperformed their non-felon counterparts, perhaps calling into question the necessity of blanket felon-juror exclusion policies.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Mona Lynch for encouraging me to pursue this project. She is a remarkable scholar and an even better mentor.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I chose to recruit active parolees rather than former offenders who had completed their term of supervision. I hypothesized that character defects and biases threatening to the jury process, if they exist, would likely present most regularly and strongly in convicted felons who had recently completed a term of incarceration.
2 The criteria requires that a prospective juror (1) must be a citizen of the United States, (2) must be 18 years of age, (3) must be domiciliaries of the State of California, (4) must be residents of the jurisdiction they are summoned to serve, (5) must not have been convicted of malfeasance in office or a felony, (6) must possess sufficient knowledge of the English language (sufficient to understand court proceedings), (7) must not be already serving as grand or trial jurors in any court in the State, and (8) must not be the subject of a conservatorship (Cal. Civ. Proc. Code § Citation203(a)(Citation1)-(Citation8) Citation2010).
3 For 2010, the United States Census reported that the host county was approximately 49.8 percent female and 50.2 percent male. Roughly 48.5 percent of the residents in the host county are White, 4.7 percent are African-American, 32 percent are Latino/a, and 14.8 percent are of some other ethnicity. Thus, in the present study and as compared to the host county, men and African-Americans are overrepresented, while Latino/a’s are underrepresented (United States Census Bureau, Citation2010).
4 As of December 31, 2011, California’s parolee population consisted of 10 percent females and 90 percent males. In the present study, 24 percent of felon-jurors are women and 76 percent are men. Thus, women are overrepresented as compared to California’s parolee population (Parole Census Data as of December 11, 2012). The racial composition of convicted felons in this study also differs slightly from California’s parolee population. Of parolees in California, 29.9 percent are White, 27.9 percent are Black, 36.7 percent are Latino/a, and 5.5 percent are some other race. In the present study, 38 percent of convicted felons are White, 33 percent are African-American, 24 percent are Latino/a, and 5 percent are some other race. Thus, as compared to California’s parolee population, white felon-jurors are overrepresented in the present study, while Latino/a felon-jurors are underrepresented (Parole Census Data as of December 11, 2012).
5 See Carletta, Citation2008, p. 4: “The kappa coefficient (K) measures pairwise agreement among a set of coders making category judgments, correcting for expected chance agreement. K = P(A) – P(E)/1 – P(E), where P(A) is the number of times the coders agree and P(E) is the number of times we would expect them to agree by chance … When there is no agreement other than that which would be expected by chance K is zero. When there is total agreement, K is one. When it is useful to do so, it is possible to test whether or not K is significantly different from chance, but more importantly, interpretation of the scale of agreement is possible.”