Bias in Jury Selection: Justifying Prohibited Peremptory Challenges

The United States Supreme Court has restricted attorneys from considering the gender and race of potential jurors in their use of peremptory challenges—the practice by which jurors may be removed from a jury without explanation or evidence of potential bias. We propose that forbidding peremptories based on social category information not only fails to decrease biased jury selection, but also encourages attorneys to search— successfully—for neutral justifications for their biased decisions. In Study 1, participants who acted as prosecutors in a jury selection paradigm eliminated female jurors more often than male jurors, but then justified these biased choices by citing genderneutral information. Troublingly, Study 2 showed that explicit instructions against the use of gender failed to eliminate selection bias, and in fact resulted in even more elaborate justifications. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. key words jurors; biases; prosecutors; gender bias