Just world beliefs, ethnicity, and juror bias

Minorities compose two-thirds of the current inmate population in the U.S. Statistics and prior studies indicate there is bias within the criminal justice system toward minorities. One aspect of this bias is juror bias. Many studies have explored the role just world beliefs play in jurors deliberating on compensatory damages in civil trials but only a handful have looked at the just world beliefs of jurors in sentencing decisions toward criminal defendants. The current study looks at the relationship between just world beliefs, ethnicity, and juror bias.; Caucasian and Hispanic participants from a Southwestern university were given a case vignette of a criminal defendant found guilty for a crime in which all details of the case were exactly the same except for the ethnicity of the defendant, which was manipulated between the ethnicities of Caucasian, Hispanic, and Black. Participants were asked to act as if they were jurors and assign a sentence they felt fair and just for the crime committed. Participants were also asked to fill out the Just World Beliefs scale, the Attitudes Toward the Punishment of Criminals Scale, the Juror Decision Record, and a demographic sheet.; Seven hypotheses were tested, but none were found significant. The model for juror bias, which looked at ethnicity of the defendant, ethnicity of the juror, and just world beliefs of the juror as a predictor of juror bias as measured by the ATPC scale neared significance at the .053 level. An interesting finding was the random assignment of the ethnicity of the defendant. Juror participants held more punitive attitudes toward Caucasian defendants, than either Hispanic or Black defendants, as measured by the ATPC scale, p = 0.01.