UNC law professors John Conley and Bill Turnier and Chicago psychologist Mary Rose conducted a study that found white and black jurors hand down nearly identical verdicts.
The study lasted nearly two years and used 600 actual jurors from Wake and Alamance counties. The jurors passed verdicts after watching tapes of staged trials of vandalism cases that employed lawyers and a judge as well as other stand-ins.
Vandalism was specifically chosen as the crime in this study because it is not closely associated to race nor does it elicit a strong emotional response.
"The first thing we found was that there was no knee-jerk bias," Conley said, referring to the absence of a direct relationship in jurors' minds between the defendant's race and their verdict.
But Turnier said that, despite what seems to be a lack of bias in the study's results, it can not be used to dismiss the presence of bias in the justice system.
"The study doesn't definitively establish that there is no bias," Turnier said. "One thing it does tell us is that in a low-profile traditional case, people of different races reach close to identical verdicts."
When the courtroom was a racially mixed environment, the jury found the same percentage of blacks guilty as whites.
Conley said when the defendant was isolated against a white prosecutor and white witnesses, the jurors seemed to feel the situation was unfair. In such situations, the jury found whites guilty 55 percent of the time and blacks 35 percent of the time.
Conley attributed the disparity between the apparent importance of the defendant's race taken by itself and that of its relation to the racial composition of the courtroom to the idea of racial relativity.
