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Abstract:
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The process of selecting a trial jury is usually accomplished with the alternate striking of prospective jurors by opposing counsel. In so doing, each side is prohibited from systematically excluding jurors on the basis of certain protected characteristics. The court decision, which established only race as a proscribed selection criterion, has since given rise to an expanding list that now includes gender, religion, national origin, and sexual preference. The trial judge must determine whether the observed strikes are inconsistent with a neutral consideration of these characteristics, and, finding so, take corrective action to ensure equal protection rights. We show that the multiple proscribed selection criteria create the statistical problem of multiplicity, and that the probability of a false signal under random selection quickly approaches 1.0 for common significance levels.
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