|
Abstract:
|
Recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings have held that attorneys in criminal trials may not exercise peremptory strikes to systematically exclude prospective jurors on the basis of race or gender. The first step in establishing a charge of improper bias requires the challenging party to show evidence that his opponent's strikes are inconsistent with random consideration of these characteristics. Frequently, court procedure dictates that there is some alternating between Prosecution and Defense in the striking process. As a result, choices for each side impact those of the other, and simply comparing the composition of jury pool with the peremptory strikes is insufficient for establishing any inference of bias. For these situations, we present a methodology for assessing the neutrality of juror strikes, based on the Lexian or Poisson binomial distribution.
|
