Down to the Last Strike: The Effect of the Jury Lottery on Criminal Convictions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the randomness in jury selection influences criminal trial outcomes, revealing that less favorable juries significantly increase conviction likelihood, especially for Black defendants, highlighting variability in justice.

Contribution

It introduces a novel identification strategy using data on peremptory strikes to causally estimate jury lottery effects on convictions, capturing unobserved juror predispositions.

Findings

Defendants with less favorable juries are more likely to be convicted.

Black defendants face a 19 percentage point higher conviction rate due to jury lottery effects.

Jury selection variability can lead to different verdicts upon retrial.

Abstract

How much does luck matter to a criminal defendant in a jury trial? We use rich data on jury selection to causally estimate how parties who are randomly assigned a less favorable jury (as proxied by whether their attorneys exhaust their peremptory strikes) fare at trial. Our novel identification strategy is unique in that it captures variation in juror predisposition coming from variables unobserved by the econometrician but observed by attorneys. We find that criminal defendants who lose the "jury lottery" are more likely to be convicted than their similarly-situated counterparts, with a significant increase (~19 percentage points) for Black defendants. Our results suggest that a considerable number of cases would result in different verdicts if retried with new (counterfactual) random draws of the jury pool, raising concerns about the variance of justice in the criminal legal system.