Background and Research Objective\u00a0<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0In my thesis, <\/span>I examine the effect of peremptory challenges, attorneys’ right to reject a certain number of potential jurors without a stated reason, on minority representation in juries and minority conviction rates.<\/span> Despite efforts by the courts to prevent discriminatory uses of peremptory challenges, research has shown that attorneys disproportionally use these challenges against minorities. This high rate of peremptory challenge use against minorities is associated with a resulting decrease in jury diversity within state trials, which also produces negative trial outcomes for minorities, such as an increase in the minority convictions rate. Because of these important consequences, I examine the direct effects of peremptory challenges on the representation of minorities in juries and its downstream effects on the minority-majority convictions gap.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Data and Methodology<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I exploit the passage of Washington State’s GR 37 bill, which limits the number of peremptory challenges prosecutors can use, in both an event study framework and a differences-in-differences strategy comparing criminal jury trials in King County (KC), Washington and Maricopa County (MC), Arizona from 2016-2022. <\/span>The data is made up of the minority share of juries in KC, whether the defendant in KC is predicted to be a minority or not, as well as, trial verdicts and trial dates for both counties during the selected time period. My empirical methods include an event study framework only using data from KC to estimate the causal effect of Washington\u2019s GR 37 bill on both the minority share of juries and the minority conviction rate. Next, I estimate the relationship of the policy change on minority conviction rates in KC using a Differences-in-Differences (DD) approach where the control group is made up of criminal cases from MC. Finally, I estimate the same relationships using a DD approach where the control group is made up of White defendants within KC compared to minority defendants within KC. I do this to identify if the policy had differential effects on White versus minority defendants.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Results\u00a0<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The evidence regarding the impact of WA\u2019s GR 37 bill on the minority share on juries is striking: the restriction of peremptory challenges significantly<\/span> increased <\/span><\/i>the minority share on juries and <\/span>decreased<\/span><\/i> the minority conviction rate, but not significantly. Specifically, after th<\/span>e policy implementation, the average minority share on juries for minority defendants increased by 13.83 percentage points overall and it increased by 10.1 more percentage points when compared to White defendants. Similarly, after the policy implementation, the minority conviction rate decreased on average by 9.5 percentage points overall and it decreased by 3.28 more percentage points when compared to the White conviction rate during that time period. Looking at the cross-county DD, after the policy implementation, the minority conviction rate decreased by <\/span>1.08 <\/span>percentage points more than it did in MC, but this was not a significant decrease.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Implications<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Most plainly, my findings indicate that limiting peremptory challenges appears to have increased the minority share of juries for all defendants and decreased the minority conviction rate. As a result, additional states with similar objectives to Washington\u2019s may seek to reform their peremptory challenge system through a limitation of these challenges to increase jury diversity and potentially remedy the majority-minority convictions gap.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Gabriella Mestre Background and Research Objective\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0In my thesis, I examine the effect of peremptory challenges, attorneys’ right to reject a certain number of potential jurors without a stated reason, on minority representation in juries and minority conviction rates. Despite efforts by the courts to prevent discriminatory uses of peremptory challenges, Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[278672],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-senior-theses"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NIM4-5N","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/econthesis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/econthesis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/econthesis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/econthesis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/econthesis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/econthesis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":366,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/econthesis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions\/366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/econthesis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/econthesis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/econthesis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}