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Thanks for the studies, especially Lehmann and Smith. It's pretty comforting that the effect sizes all seem to be pretty small, possibly as a result of jury selection pruning the outliers (as you suggested). There does seem to be an overrepresentation of women (though not by as much as I had thought), but perhaps that's not really a problem.
I'm not so sure this is true. Lehmann and Smith looked at race, religiosity, income, gender, and age, and of these traits, I would expect income, gender, and age to be most directly relevant in terms of selection effects before pre-jury selection. Income obviously due to hardship from serving, but also gender for things like being a single parent/sole breadwinner and age as a proxy for retiredness. Race is probably correlated with lots of these things, but I would assume that initial selection is probably less affected by race than by these other factors.
Glad to be of service!
I agree that jury selection is less affected by race than other factors. However, given the demographics of criminal charges, a black defendant is substantially more likely to face an all white jury than a white defendant is.
Furthermore, given the salience of juries racial composition, a lot more research has been done on it. In fact Anwar, Bayer, and Hjalmarsson (2022) show in a short, sweet, and much more convincing article that having a higher proportion of jurors from black dominated zip codes results in lower conviction rates and less harsh sentences for black defendants (Table 2). No multiple testing problems here, they only test the obvious outcomes!
They also have a paper from a decade earlier, ABH (2012) showing that juries with at least one black defendant are substantially less likely to convict black defendants (pg. 34.) Incidentally, the reduction of having at least one black juror with a black defendant almost exactly cancels out the greater chance of conviction from the defendant being black.
I'm sharing these papers from the authors I've already linked to, because I could spend all day listing papers looking at this question. I think it's pretty clear that having more black jurors means black defendants are less likely to be convicted. I think what is more interesting is the interpretation of this result.
One interesting thing about ABH (2022) is that they find that white defendants don't get lower conviction rates from black jurors, conflicting with what was found in L&S, which concluded that black jurors reduced conviction rates for all defendants by roughly equal rates.
My initial hunch for explaining why black jurors would be more favorable to the defendant would have to do with a general skepticism of the system among black people (which would also help white defendants), but if the black juror effect only happens with black defendants, then a more in-group style explanation would make more sense. But this is all just speculation on my part.
I'm skeptical of in-group explanations. In both ABH (2012) and (2022) jury representation from black jurors or underrepresented neighborhoods is not sufficient to make up the full difference. This means that jurors of other races need to be complicit in the decisions as well.
(Incidentally, ABH 2012 makes the case even stronger. The authors say that black jurors were more likely to convict white defendants, but in reality that is not the case. Black Defendants in their sample appear more likely to convict everyone, but everyone equally. At least, that's my interpretation of Table 4. There is room for disagreement, and even after that disagreement it is no comment on the quality of decisions.)
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