Weekend Reads | How Representative Are Jurors?

by Kevin Schofield

This weekend's read is a report from three researchers at Seattle University's Crime and Justice Research Center on the demographics of the people who serve on juries in Washington's State courts.

There have been various piecemeal efforts to collect demographic data on jurors for the past several years, but in 2021, the State Legislature passed a law requiring the State government to provide all State courts with a demographic survey of "jurors who begin a jury term." The legislature's stated goal for the survey effort was to determine "whether jurors are representative of the county populations for which they are selected." The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the accused a speedy, public trial "by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed," and courts and other legal experts agree that a jury pool that does not reflect the demographics of the local community does not meet the constitutional standard.

This report, issued in late June of this year, is the sixth in a series but by far the most comprehensive, benefiting from the legislature's mandate to provide statewide data and analysis. That said, it notes that many of the rural counties don't hold many jury trials, so the small amount of data collected is not enough to guarantee anonymity for the jurors. Thus the report focuses on just eight court systems, mostly in Western Washington but also including Spokane. The report analyzes data collected through most of 2022 and the first half of 2023.

The results confirm what previous studies have found: People of Color and those of low socioeconomic status are underrepresented on juries. The extent of the underrepresentation varies by race and ethnicity, however, as well as by county. Within King County, Black and African American people are dramatically underrepresented; American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders are moderately underrepresented; White and Hispanic people are close to proportional; and Asian people are overrepresented.

People who identify as multi-race are overrepresented on juries in many counties, but not enough to make up for the underrepresentation of people who identify with a single race. This survey is fairly unique in that it reports on some specific multi-race pairs, such as "Asian and White" and "Black/African American and White," both of which are apparently overrepresented in the jury population.

The report also confirms another long-held belief: Socioeconomic status correlates highly with representation on juries. In fact, education, employment, and income level — all closely related themselves — all correlate to jury service. This makes intuitive sense, since jury duty takes people away from paying jobs, and the jobs with the flexibility to allow for jury service without causing an employee to lose pay tend to be the ones that require higher levels of education. The survey data supports this: Of the barriers to jury service indicated by jurors, work-related ones were the most frequent. In addition, jurors also commonly cited dependent-care responsibilities and personal health issues as barriers. Not surprisingly, then, women (who tend to bear more of the burden of dependent care) were more likely to cite dependent-care conflicts with jury duty service.

This report confirms and expands our understanding of representation and potential bias in juries, but it also points out how much we still don't know. For example, there is no data on the demographics of people who don't respond to a jury summons. In addition to arguing for expanded data collection efforts, the report also makes a few other recommendations to improve representation, including two key ones: experimenting with increases in juror compensation to make up for lost wages, and checking whether the "master list" sources used by counties to summon people for jury duty are truly representative of their communities.

Statewide Juror Summons Demographic Survey Project: An Analysis of Selected County Data, 2023 Final Report

Featured image via Crazy City Lady/Shutterstock.com.