Fate of Black Defendants May Rest with Juror Backgrounds

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

Analyzing the Cases

The Chicago Reporter reviewed case files for 147 of the 175 felony division jury trials held in Cook County between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2000. The division includes all Cook County felony cases, including murders, rapes and armed robberies.

The Reporter logged the name, race, gender, age and address of each defendant. The Reporter also logged the charges, verdicts and the names of jourors who signed verdict sheets in each case. Jurors returned 161 verdicts in the 147 cases reviewed by the Reporter. In 14 cases in which the defendants were on trial for multiple charges, jurors returned more than one verdict.

The Office of the Cook County Jury Administrator provided a database with the name, gender and address of every person reporting for jury duty in the county between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2000. The Reporter matched the names of jurors from the 161 verdicts with names in the database, and was able to identify all 12 jurors for 92 percent of the verdicts. For all remaining verdicts, the Reporter identified at least 10 jurors.

The analysis focused on the racial demographics of jurors' census tracts, the estimated annual per capita income of jurors' ZIP code areas, the verdicts and the race of defendants. The Reporter used data from the 2000 Census to determine the racial demographics of census tracts for 98 percent of the 1,749 jurors studied. Census tracts that were at least 90 percent black were designated as 'predominantly black and census tracts that were at least 90 percent white were "predominantly white." The Reporter used 2000 estimates by ZIP code from Claritas Inc., a national marketing research firm, to determine the annual per capita income of areas where the jurors lived. Income data from the census are not yet available.