Fate of Black Defendants May Rest with Juror Backgrounds

When a jury begins its deliberations, it relies on the testimony and the exhibits. But jurors also bring their racial and economic backgrounds into the jury room, experts said. And that can affect the outcome for black defendants in Cook County, The Chicago Reporter found.

The Reporter examined 147 of the 175 felony division jury trials completed in the Cook County Circuit Court between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2000. The Reporter logged the race of each defendant, the charges, the verdict and the home addresses of each juror. The remaining case files were unavailable, according to the court clerk's office.

The Reporter found:

* Juries with at least three people from predominantly white neighborhoods reached guilty verdicts for black defendants in 76 percent of the cases, compared to 67 percent when the juries included three or more people from mostly black neighborhoods.

* The conviction rate for black defendants rose as the number of jurors from mostly white areas rose, and decreased as the number of jurors from mostly black areas increased.

* The conviction rate for black defendants dropped as the number of jurors from communities with below-average incomes went up. Most black defendants came from such areas.

Jurors who come from different backgrounds might be more likely to doubt the credibility of poor, minority witnesses and defendants, experts said.

"What you presented is interesting and food for thought," said Paul P. Biebel Jr., presiding judge of the court's Criminal Division. "These kinds of analysis will be the subject of conversation for many judges."

By law, judges instruct jurors that defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But some jurors admit they stray from those instructions, said Bill Grimes, a communications consultant with Zagnoli McEvoy Foley Ltd., a Chicago trial consulting firm. Grimes has conducted hundreds of post-trial interviews with jurors from real and mock juries.

"They need to have a story that makes sense," he said. And "there certainly are people who come in with some preconceived notion. We hear people say that: 'He didn't prove that he didn't do it."

Compounding Effect

"I would hate to draw conclusions based on those statistics," said LaDonna Carlton, president of Chicago-based Carlton Trial Consulting & Research Center Inc. Carlton said she has more than 20 years' experience as a paid advisor on jury selection and witness preparation. "Every case is different."

But University of Iowa law professor David C. Baldus disagreed. "This is fairly compelling evidence that the number of African American jurors has an impact on the verdicts," said Baldus, who helped lead a 2001 study that found the racial composition of juries affected the outcome of death penalty trials in Philadelphia.

In "Death Sentencing in Black and White: An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Jurors' Race and Jury Racial Composition," a February article in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, researchers document views among black and white jurors in death penalty cases. The three authors conclude that the race of jurors affected the outcomes.

"They're seeing the same case differently," said co-author Benjamin D. Steiner, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware.

Sheri Lynn Johnson, a law professor at Cornell University, said mock jury studies and research show that jurors often assume guilt--or its likelihood--based on the defendant's race.

When evidence is not clear-cut, white jurors are more likely to convict black defendants than whites, said Johnson, who began studying juries in the mid-I 980s.

"In cases when people are not certain what to do, they rely on stereotypes of who is likely to commit crime," Johnson said.

That may have been the case in the retrial of Jonathan Tolliver, a 1 9-year-old African American found guilty of killing Michael Ceriale, a white police officer. Tolliver's fingerprints were not found on the murder weapon, a .357 Magnum revolver, and laboratory tests to determine whether he had fired a gun were inconclusive.

Police testified that witnesses had put Tolliver at the crime scene outside a Robert Taylor Homes high rise at 4101 S. Federal St. But seven witnesses, all black residents of the Taylor Homes, testified police coerced them to identify Tolliver as the shooter during previous grand jury testimony. Detectives denied those charges.

"Race and social class all matter when it comes to believability," said Darnell F. Hawkins, a professor of African American studies, criminal justice and sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"In particular, lower class African American individuals have difficulty being credible witnesses in courtrooms. When you add to it housing projects and gangs, you can see the compounding effect."

Police Mistrust

Jurors' personal experiences can play an important role. Blacks and whites often have very different experiences involving police, and that could affect jury verdicts in criminal trials, many of which rely on police officer testimony, said Grimes.

Drug cases in local criminal courts often rest primarily on police testimony, said Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

"It's often much easier for a juror of color to believe a defendant's testimony that the officer planted evidence or lied in some other way about the crime," he said.

That happened when Lena Ross, an African American, went on trial on Feb. 15, 2000, at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse, at 26th Street and California Avenue in Chicago, for two counts of drug possession and one of delivery of a controlled substance. Felicia Simmons of south suburban Calumet Park and Chantel Whitfield of south suburban Harvey said they were the only African Americans on the jury.

"The police were watching the defendant for like two weeks and had a very strong case against her," said George Klauke, a white juror from north suburban Winnetka who served on Ross' trial. "They caught her red-handed with the drugs."

But Simmons and Whitfield said that was the officers' version.

Whitfield said the other jurors lived in communities far removed from Ross' Austin neighborhood on Chicago's West Side and didn't seem to care what happened to her. "They wanted to send her to jail for 10 years over $20 worth of crack," Whitfield said. "I think there was some prejudice in it."

Eventually the jury compromised, the three jurors said. It convicted Ross only of delivery of a controlled substance, court records show.

Discrimination builds African Americans' mistrust of police and the legal system, according to Steiner and his colleagues. They used data from the Capital Jury Project, a 10-year study that included interviews with more than 1,100 jurors in 340 death penalty trials in 14 states, not including Illinois.

The project found blacks had less confidence than whites in the courts and were "far less approving" of police.

White jurors more often argued for the death penalty and believed black defendants lacked remorse and still posed a threat. Black jurors, however, were more likely to doubt the defendants' guilt and consider their upbringing. In one case, "where a black juror said the defendant 'seemed sorry and pled for his life,' a white juror saw 'the coldness of the authors wrote.

The Circuit Court of Cook County does not record the race of people who report for jury duty. So the Reporter used 2000 census data to determine the racial composition of census tracts for the addresses of the 1,749 jurors studied. Nearly a third lived in tracts that were at least 90 percent black or 90 percent white.

Juries with at least three members from predominantly white tracts convicted black defendants in 29 of 38 cases analyzed by the Reporter, or 76 percent of the time, compared to 18 of 27 cases, or 67 percent, when juries had at least three members from black areas. And the conviction rate fell as the number of jurors from black census tracts went up. When there were no people from black census tracts on the jury, black defendants were convicted 89 percent of the time; with three or more people from black areas, the rate was 67 percent.

The findings mirror those in the Capital Jury Project, which found juries with five or more white men imposed the death sentence in 71 percent of death penalty cases with black defendants and white victims.

The number was 30 percent for juries with four or fewer white men.

Culture Shock

Former Illinois Appellate Court Justice R. Eugene Pincham said black defendants who are innocent sometimes fall victim to misperception and racial bias. Pincham was not surprised by the Reporter's findings.

"Blacks have an awareness of each other, of our culture, our characteristics, our traits, that whites don't," said Pincham, who is African American. "Ethnic groups tend to identify with their own."

In cases the Reporter analyzed, most black defendants came from mostly black areas. More than 80 percent of the black defendants came from ZIP code areas with annual per capita incomes below $20,808, the citywide average, while 38 percent of their jurors came from such areas.

Juries comprised of at least five people from the poorer areas more often acquitted black defendants than juries with at least five individuals from more affluent areas.

Grimes, a jury consultant for 11 years, said some jurors might have difficulty believing witnesses who come from very different economic backgrounds.

Richard P. Steinken, a Tolliver defense attorney and a partner with Jenner & Block, believes that happened in his client's second trial. "In many ways what our case boiled down to was 'Are you going to believe the testimony of these young black kids from the projects that have some involvement with the street gangs, or are you going to believe the testimony of Chicago Police Department detectives and officers?'"

The jury for Tolliver's second trial included six whites, five African Americans and a Latino. Ten of the 12 jurors came from communities with annual per capita incomes between $15,632 and $96,089; two came from lower-income areas. The area that includes the Taylor Homes- where Tolliver and many of the trial's witnesses lived-has a per capita income of $10,234. The jurors in Tolliver's second trial either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for an interview.

"Even black jurors, if they don't have direct experience with life there [at the Taylor Homes], would have a hard time understanding it," said Melissa C. Brown, a Tolliver lawyer with Foley & Lardner.

But the differences can go far beyond a juror's ability to empathize, Pincham said.

"The difference in culture creates a hostility," he said. "This is why it's so much easier to represent a white defendant."

Contributing: Micah Holmquist, Vince Kong and Ellyn M Ong. Joyce C. Armour Anita Bryant, Tim Bush, LaSonja Hill, Eric W Luchman and Rupa Shenoy helped research this article.

[Graph omitted]

Economic Gap
Black defendants in felony division trials in Cook County were more
likely to be convicted when most of the jurors came from areas with
per capita incomes above the city wide average of $20,808 a year.
Verdicts for Black Defendants:
Number of jurors from areas above
Chicago's per capita income        Guilty  Not Guilty  Percent Guilty
0 to 6                               23        11           68%
7 to 12                              66        19           78%
Note: In cases involving a black defendant, The Chicago Reporter was
able to identify all l2 jurors for 111 of the 119 verdicts and 11 of
12 jurors in the other eight verdicts. Income level refers to annual
per capita income for the ZIP code areas where jurors live.
Source: Office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Office
of the Cook County Jury Adminitrator, Claritas Inc.; analyzed by The
Chicago Reporter.

Analyzing the Cases

The Chicago Reporter reviewed case files for 147 of the 175 felony division jury trials held in Cook County between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2000. The division includes all Cook County felony cases, including murders, rapes and armed robberies.

The Reporter logged the name, race, gender, age and address of each defendant. The Reporter also logged the charges, verdicts and the names of jourors who signed verdict sheets in each case. Jurors returned 161 verdicts in the 147 cases reviewed by the Reporter. In 14 cases in which the defendants were on trial for multiple charges, jurors returned more than one verdict.

The Office of the Cook County Jury Administrator provided a database with the name, gender and address of every person reporting for jury duty in the county between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2000. The Reporter matched the names of jurors from the 161 verdicts with names in the database, and was able to identify all 12 jurors for 92 percent of the verdicts. For all remaining verdicts, the Reporter identified at least 10 jurors.

The analysis focused on the racial demographics of jurors' census tracts, the estimated annual per capita income of jurors' ZIP code areas, the verdicts and the race of defendants. The Reporter used data from the 2000 Census to determine the racial demographics of census tracts for 98 percent of the 1,749 jurors studied. Census tracts that were at least 90 percent black were designated as 'predominantly black and census tracts that were at least 90 percent white were "predominantly white." The Reporter used 2000 estimates by ZIP code from Claritas Inc., a national marketing research firm, to determine the annual per capita income of areas where the jurors lived. Income data from the census are not yet available.

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