All-white juries do not discriminate
Juries overall appear ‘efficient and effective’ and convict on almost two thirds of all charges presented to them, according to a ground-breaking study by the Ministry of Justice into the secrets of the jury room. Paul Sullivan reports.
The study, in which 70,000 trials were analysed, conducted by Professor Cheryl Thomas of University College London, found that contrary to popular belief and previous government reports, juries actually convict more often than they acquit in rape cases. A previous Home Office study claiming that jury acquittals were more common than convictions was based on only 181 verdicts in a few courts. The current study was based on more than 4,000 jury rape verdicts between 2006 and 2008.
However, two-thirds of jurors do not understand what judges tell them about the law when they retire to consider their verdicts. Most jurors (67%) also felt they should be given more information, preferably in writing, about how to conduct deliberations and half are not sure what to do if something ‘improper’ - such as bullying - goes on in the jury room.
The research, the first of its kind, found that the greater number of charges, the greater the likelihood of a guilty verdict, rising steeply from 40 per cent with one charge to 80 per cent with five charges.
The Report concluded that juries, including all white ones, are not racially prejudiced. The figures show that juries treat black and white defendants equally. Professor Thomas said the findings that all-white juries do not discriminate was ‘an extremely important conclusion which is highly reliable’. Jurors, she said, were more likely to convict a white defendant accused of assaulting a black victim compared with a white victim. Nor did white jurors serving on all-white juries racially stereotype defendants as people likely to commit certain offences, based on race.
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Are juries fair? Ministry of Justice February 2010
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