Jury Bias in Criminal Cases: Sexual Assault, Homicide, and Generic Prejudice

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The purposes of this research are to further probe the experimental model and to evaluate the roles of specific emotions as mediators of bias. Our work distinguishes generic prejudice -- prejudgments about classes of cases and defendants -- from other forms of juror bias that undercut the impartiality principle of the Constitution. Peremptory challenges may be the most effective weapon against generic prejudice. Attorneys use peremptory challenges to remove venire people who show signs of generic prejudice against a type of client, charge, or category of offense. However, judges, scholars, and theorists have attacked peremptory challenges on applied and theoretical grounds. Existing studies support the utility of a judgment model of generic prejudice to parse types of bias, but leave open the question of why different fact patterns produce different types of bias. Our study develops an experimental method to study generic prejudice in the context of peremptory challenges, and tests the role of jurors' emotional responses as one explanation for the bias.