Abstract
Stephanie Albertson bravely tackles an important and complex question in her new book: What is the impact of the race of a juror on how that juror perceives certain scientific evidence? Her work is an important contribution to the literature, although it leaves the reader yearning for more.
Whenever a jury returns a “wrong” verdict (translation: not the verdict that the person expressing an opinion would have returned), the predictable debate ensues as to whether the jury system can be trusted to “get it right.” Putting aside some important truths—that the person complaining about the verdict (1) did not hear all the evidence, (2) likely heard about inadmissible evidence, and (3) probably has no idea what the legal standard was that the jurors had to consider—the debate resurfaces again and again (especially in a high-profile or controversial case), and reflects our suspicions that jurors are not smart enough or too gullible or too closed-minded to really render “an accurate verdict.” In recent years, it seems as if this happens all the more frequently when jurors are required to consider the impact of scientific evidence, evidence that often depends on the understanding and interpretation of facts and principles that are normally beyond the ken of lay people. Both saturation press coverage of criminal cases turning on DNA evidence, and what is commonly known as the “CSI effect” (the expectation that jurors expect certain kind of forensic evidence presented in ways that they have become familiar with from the CSI TV franchise) have contributed to this state of affairs.
Researchers have turned their attention to jury behavior in recent years in efforts to better understand how jurors construe evidence and why they decide certain cases the way they do. In this scholarship, they have focused specifically on the extent to which jurors do comprehend scientific evidence and how such evidence is weighed in the deliberation process. But, until the publication of this book, there has been no scholarly consideration of the potential impact of juror race on how they assess this evidence.
Albertson’s findings are these: race—along with educational background in science and math, income and years of school completed—does influence jurors’ perceptions toward complex scientific evidence (p. 123), and, specifically, African American jurors “had significantly less confidence in science” than did White jurors (p. 119), although African American jurors with more education were more likely to have positive assessments of scientific evidence (p. 120). Interestingly, unemployed African American jurors had greater faith in science than did employed jurors (p. 109). Her recommendations are not particularly surprising—allow jurors to openly ask questions during trial (p. 124), bolster science and math courses as part of broad educational reform (p. 125), and continue researching this area of law and policy (p. 126).
This is all fine as far as it goes, but it was concerning (perplexing, perhaps, is the better word) that Albertson—who clearly had read and assimilated all the research on juror comprehension of scientific evidence (see Chapter 4) and on attitude formation (see Chapter 2) 1 —did not mention what may be the most significant outside factor of all: how both the Tuskegee experiments and prior history of medical experimentation have created negative attitudes among African Americans toward all of medical science (Gamble, 1997; Mastroianni, 2006; see generally, Jones, 1993), a set of attitudes that inevitably has an impact on her findings. By way of example, Albertson discusses some of the important, high-profile cases involving DNA evidence (including, inevitably, the O. J. Simpson case, see pp. 36–48, and especially pp. 43–45) but does not discuss this in the context of jurors’ other attitudes toward science. There may be a disconnect between attitudes toward what happens in the confines of the courtroom and what happens in society at large.
Even after controlling for markers of social class, African Americans are less trusting than are White Americans of science (Corbie-Smith, Thomas, & St. George, 2002). Scholars see this as a result of experiences that date to the times of slavery (Gamble, 1993, 1997); if this is so (and there seems to be no contrary valid/reliable evidence that has been reported), it is not likely that the reforms Albertson suggests will have much of an ultimate impact.
There is some additional irony here, because other contemporaneous research is telling us that trust in science on the part of political conservatives has declined sharply over the past 40 years (Gauchat, 2012). Just as interesting, all other group differences in trust in science were found to be largely stable over the period, except for survey respondents identifying as conservative (Id.). Albertson did not factor in political views, but in light of this research, it would seem that that would also be a critical “next step” in this venture.
There are some other (relatively minor) problems that could have been solved by better editing. 2 But, on balance, it appears that Albertson has made a contribution to the literature in this work. Had she gone beyond the relatively narrow scope of her project and contextualized her findings with what we know about the history of how African Americans have been treated in matters of scientific experimentation, the book would have been even more valuable. Although these were not courtroom-focused experiences, they are ones that must be considered by those who take these important issues seriously.