Things aren鈥檛 looking good. Your case has gone all the way to trial, despite your innocence. As your long walk into the courtroom begins, you can only hope that your judge and jury are as fair-minded as you鈥檝e been led to expect.
But the chances are that many will have formed an opinion of your guilt or innocence before anyone even speaks. Biases for age, attractiveness, race and gender have all been identified among jurors as well as judges. 鈥淔actors which are not supposed to be determining outcomes in our courtrooms are in fact having an effect,鈥� says Adam Benforado of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and author of Unfair: The new science of criminal injustice. 鈥淲e are not the rational actors that we think we are.鈥�
have shown that all-white juries are more likely to convict black defendants for crimes perpetrated against white victims, for example, while a recent Canadian study found that male mock jurors were more convinced a defendant was guilty of rape if the victim鈥檚 photograph had been manipulated to make them look unattractive than when the victim was good-looking.
Advertisement
61% of overturned convictions examined by the US Innocence Project involved African American defendants*
This individual bias also seeps into the way jurors interpret evidence. Take the case of Victor Harris, a Georgia teenager who was paralysed following a 2007 chase in which a police car deliberately hit the back of his car to spin it to a stop. Convinced that no reasonable juror could conclude the policeman was at fault from footage of this chase, Supreme Court justices took the unusual step of posting online. Yet when a broad cross-section of Americans was shown the video, sharp divisions emerged in their conclusions, with 26 per cent stating the police response was disproportionate to the risk Harris posed. 鈥淵ou often assume that there is one objective way to see the facts, but it turns out that jurors鈥� background experiences shape how they see the world,鈥� says Benforado.
Given that these distorting influences exist, Benforado and others believe measures should be taken to level the playing field. Simply making people aware that such implicit biases exist can help to mitigate the effects, so a handful of US judges have started issuing jurors with instructions to examine their own attitudes.
Further down the line, another option would be to create virtual courtrooms, in which neutral avatars represent plaintiffs and defendants, and many of the potential variables can be more closely controlled. 鈥淚t would allow people to focus on what is meant to make a difference: the law and the facts, not the defendant鈥檚 skin, the southern drawl of the attorney, or the colour of the courtroom walls,鈥� Benforado says.
*Out of a total of 342 convictions overturned in the US聽since 1989, according to the US聽Innocence Project. Multiple factors were involved in many of these cases.
Bad science can put you behind bars 鈥� read more of our special report to stay free
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淏ias in the courtroom鈥�
