We are all biased in some way. Humans will inevitably evaluate new things based on their past experience and knowledge, and these biases can effect us in systematic ways. In this project, you will examine the possibility of racial bias in jury selection by looking at two actual court cases tried in the United States.
In each case, an African-American was on trial and each had a jury with no African-Americans seated. You will first examine a case study of the Swain trial, and consider questions raised during that case.
In the next step, to perform the analyses in this project, you will consider a different set of data based on a more recent trial in Monroe County, Alabama, which has a population of 24,000. The proportion of whites in that county is 58%; the proportion of blacks is 40%. In each of these cases you will consider in this project, the possibility of racial bias in the selection of the juries was raised on their appeal. In each case, the higher court determined that there was insufficient evidence of racial bias.
Each defendant was convicted and given the death sentence.