Fate of Black Defendants May Rest with Juror Backgrounds

Chicago Reporter, The, July, 2001 by Alden K. Loury

When a jury begins its deliberations, it relies on the testimony and the exhibits. But jurors also bring their racial and economic backgrounds into the jury room, experts said. And that can affect the outcome for black defendants in Cook County, The Chicago Reporter found.

The Reporter examined 147 of the 175 felony division jury trials completed in the Cook County Circuit Court between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2000. The Reporter logged the race of each defendant, the charges, the verdict and the home addresses of each juror. The remaining case files were unavailable, according to the court clerk's office.

The Reporter found:

* Juries with at least three people from predominantly white neighborhoods reached guilty verdicts for black defendants in 76 percent of the cases, compared to 67 percent when the juries included three or more people from mostly black neighborhoods.

* The conviction rate for black defendants rose as the number of jurors from mostly white areas rose, and decreased as the number of jurors from mostly black areas increased.

* The conviction rate for black defendants dropped as the number of jurors from communities with below-average incomes went up. Most black defendants came from such areas.

Jurors who come from different backgrounds might be more likely to doubt the credibility of poor, minority witnesses and defendants, experts said.

"What you presented is interesting and food for thought," said Paul P. Biebel Jr., presiding judge of the court's Criminal Division. "These kinds of analysis will be the subject of conversation for many judges."

By law, judges instruct jurors that defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But some jurors admit they stray from those instructions, said Bill Grimes, a communications consultant with Zagnoli McEvoy Foley Ltd., a Chicago trial consulting firm. Grimes has conducted hundreds of post-trial interviews with jurors from real and mock juries.

"They need to have a story that makes sense," he said. And "there certainly are people who come in with some preconceived notion. We hear people say that: 'He didn't prove that he didn't do it."

Compounding Effect

"I would hate to draw conclusions based on those statistics," said LaDonna Carlton, president of Chicago-based Carlton Trial Consulting & Research Center Inc. Carlton said she has more than 20 years' experience as a paid advisor on jury selection and witness preparation. "Every case is different."

But University of Iowa law professor David C. Baldus disagreed. "This is fairly compelling evidence that the number of African American jurors has an impact on the verdicts," said Baldus, who helped lead a 2001 study that found the racial composition of juries affected the outcome of death penalty trials in Philadelphia.

In "Death Sentencing in Black and White: An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Jurors' Race and Jury Racial Composition," a February article in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, researchers document views among black and white jurors in death penalty cases. The three authors conclude that the race of jurors affected the outcomes.

"They're seeing the same case differently," said co-author Benjamin D. Steiner, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware.

Sheri Lynn Johnson, a law professor at Cornell University, said mock jury studies and research show that jurors often assume guilt--or its likelihood--based on the defendant's race.

When evidence is not clear-cut, white jurors are more likely to convict black defendants than whites, said Johnson, who began studying juries in the mid-I 980s.

"In cases when people are not certain what to do, they rely on stereotypes of who is likely to commit crime," Johnson said.

That may have been the case in the retrial of Jonathan Tolliver, a 1 9-year-old African American found guilty of killing Michael Ceriale, a white police officer. Tolliver's fingerprints were not found on the murder weapon, a .357 Magnum revolver, and laboratory tests to determine whether he had fired a gun were inconclusive.

Police testified that witnesses had put Tolliver at the crime scene outside a Robert Taylor Homes high rise at 4101 S. Federal St. But seven witnesses, all black residents of the Taylor Homes, testified police coerced them to identify Tolliver as the shooter during previous grand jury testimony. Detectives denied those charges.

"Race and social class all matter when it comes to believability," said Darnell F. Hawkins, a professor of African American studies, criminal justice and sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"In particular, lower class African American individuals have difficulty being credible witnesses in courtrooms. When you add to it housing projects and gangs, you can see the compounding effect."

Police Mistrust

Jurors' personal experiences can play an important role. Blacks and whites often have very different experiences involving police, and that could affect jury verdicts in criminal trials, many of which rely on police officer testimony, said Grimes.