Crayon Diversity Award

Today's Crayon Diversity Award goes to the King County Superior Court, who, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tells us, is changing the jury service system because "Widening racial diversity of those serving is one of program's goals". Now I'm all in favor of making jury service more convenient for people (which the changes seem to do) and ensuring that the jury pool is as inclusive as possible, but is lack of racial diversity even a problem? The King County Courts and the P-I want us to think it's a problem, to wit the following quotes:

Glancing around the hard wooden benches in a King County courtroom last week, Richard Blair couldn't help noticing who surrounded him.

Of the 45 people assembled as possible jurors for that morning's trial, Blair was one of only two African Americans. "I looked at that and I said, 'What's wrong with this picture?' " he recalled.

County judges agree it's wrong. And improving racial diversity is one of the goals behind a new effort to broaden participation in Superior Court juries.

and

judges, lawyers and administrators agree it's a largely white group filling jury boxes day after day. That's a concern in a justice system that's supposed to provide each defendant with a jury of peers.

Only two African Americans out of 45! And jurors are a largely white group! Shocking? Hardly.

The US Census Bureau reports that 75.5% of the residents of King County are white (I guess this happens to be a largely white community) and 6.3% claim at least some African ancestry. In other words, in a group of 45 randomly selected King County residents you will find, on average, 2.8 African Americans. So only two African Americans in the jury room is more or less what you should expect.

But this unnecessarily histrionic anecdote aside, what are the actual statistics on the demographic breakdown of the jury pool?

The racial makeup of those who actually serve is unknown. The county doesn't keep track of ethnicity, income level or other juror characteristics because, according to court administrators, it's too difficult. Olney said the last time surveys were tried, most people declined to fill them out.

So even though nobody has any clue how diverse the jury pool really is, the axiom is that diversity needs to be improved.

There are also the other questions of how changing the racial composition of a jury will improve the fairness of the process, whether deliberately increasing the jury participation of, say, African Americans beyond their proportional presence in the community would itself be fair, and whether ensuring diversity of factors other than race (e.g. education, religion, family status, age, economic status, political beliefs) may be more important than racial diversity. But the lesson here for me is that when a newspaper headline bemoans the lack of "racial diversity", there's a good chance the story has no foundation in reality.

UPDATE John Rosenberg adds his thoughts on "diversity" in jury selection.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at June 02, 2003 11:20 AM