Publication Date:
2013-06-08
Description:
The North Carolina Racial Justice Act allows defendants to submit statistical studies of prosecutorial actions pertaining to their seeking the death penalty or in making peremptory challenges. These studies may consider data from four geographical regions: the state, county, judicial division or prosecutorial district. A study of the effect of race on peremptory challenges in death penalty cases demonstrating statistically significant disparities disadvantaging Black defendants has been submitted in several cases. This comment shows that a more appropriate statistical analysis yields much stronger statistical evidence that race entered into the peremptory challenge process in Randolph County than the affidavit submitted by the authors of the study. A subsequent sensitivity analysis indicates that in order for a characteristic to explain the highly statistically significant disparity, it would need to increase the odds of an individual being challenged by a factor of three and more than twice as many Black venire members would need to possess that characteristic as non-Blacks. Since the data examined excluded potential jurors who had been removed for cause, it may be difficult for the state to find a legitimate reason justifying the racial disparity.
Print ISSN:
1470-8396
Electronic ISSN:
1470-840X
Topics:
Mathematics
,
Law
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