Mona Lynch

Mona Lynch will draw on video-recorded deliberations data from two large-scale mock jury studies that test how the race of defendants and individual jurors and jury group racial characteristics interact in predicting verdicts in a drug conspiracy case. Both studies resulted in an unexpected finding: mock jurors became significantly less supportive of a guilty verdict for a Black defendant charged in a federal drug conspiracy case, relative to a white defendant, after small group deliberations. Lynch will write a set of articles that address these questions: 1) Do juries talk about law enforcement differently when the defendant is Black compared to when he is white and what are those differences? 2) Do Black jurors, in particular, engage in education efforts of their fellow jurors about police integrity and system bias? 3) Does jury group diversity predict more thorough, higher-quality deliberations?