American Criminal Justice

Ethnic minorities compose two-thirds of the current inmate population in the U.S. Research indicates there is bias within this system. One aspect of this bias is juror bias. While research has explored the implication of just world beliefs in juror bias in civil trials, very few have looked at this variable in sentencing decisions toward criminal defendants. The current study looks at the relationship between just world beliefs, ethnicity, and juror bias. European and Hispanic American participants were given a case vignette of a criminal defendant found guilty for a crime. The ethnicity of the defendant was manipulated. Participants were asked to act as if they were jurors and assign a sentence they felt fair and just for the crime committed. The model developed to predict juror bias as measured by the Attitudes Toward the Punishment of Criminals 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 European American defendants, than either Hispanic American or African defendants, as measured by the ATPC scale, p = 0.01.