Jury Decision Making Research Paper

For decades, the Criminal Justice System has been thought to be an equitable system used to provide security and safety to our country. However, there has been an ongoing debate about the United States Criminal Justice System and whether or not it is a just and honorable system to rely on when dealing with perpetrators. More specifically, citizens have begun to notice trends in juror decision-making when dealing with specific crime types and races. In fact, some studies have begun to look at the influence of personal characteristics of defendants and victims on jurors (Sommers, 2007). As a result, the concerns and questions pertaining to the internal validity of the Criminal Justice system have increased throughout the last 10 years.
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Use words like "might," "could," etc. throughout your paper.

ETHNICITY AND CRIME PERCEPTIONS ON JURY DECISIONS
4
stereotypical race crime biases play into a jury’s decision making, and from there, analyze what we can do to reduce the impact. If race stereotypical crimes affect jury decision-making, then a jury’s decision is not just based on evidence, as it should be, but on other external factors as well.
Studies support the claim that stereotypical race crime does affect decisions made by juries (Hunt, 2015). Verdicts are biased by social stereotypical crimes and this can be damaging because people in the jury are not solely focusing on the one crime at hand. Instead, they are generalizing the crime to fit stereotypes they already believe. As a result, they are biasing their decisions (Skorinko & Spellman, 2013). In addition, studies have also shown memory affects why jurors associate crimes with stereotypes (Skorinko & Spellman, 2013). People in the jury may have past memories about crimes committed by blacks and whites, thus leading them to have a biased opinion. For instance, if someone knows more cases where blacks have committed blue-collar crimes rather than whites, they create an association, or stereotype, that