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Keywords: introduction to data science course, case study, tidyverse
Season Two of APM Reports’ podcast In the Dark examined the case of Curtis Flowers, who had been tried for the same crime six times, remaining on death row for 22 years despite winning appeal after appeal. Finally, on June 21, 2019, the United States Supreme Court reversed Curtis Flowers’ 1996 murder conviction, ruling that Flowers’ constitutional rights were violated because prosecutors intentionally removed black jurors. An important source of quantitative evidence in this case came from APM Reports journalists, who painstakingly gathered data from jury trials over a 26-year period in central Mississippi to determine whether or not there were racial disparities in the way that lawyers used peremptory strikes. These journalists ultimately made their white paper and data publicly available. We have found this case study to be a powerful example for an Introduction to Data Science course and have created teaching materials that are available in a GitHub repository. It not only provides opportunities for introductory students to apply their newfound skills in data merging, wrangling, and visualization, but it does so within a real, timely, and significant case study that opens up important discussions about the power and limitations of data. As such, the Mississippi juries case study offers a nice complement to or replacement for “standard” examples used in introductory data science courses.