4 ms·

Juries are composed of 12 people. Saying there are discrepancies between the jury pool and the US of less than 8 percentage points is somewhat silly -- making e

• thaumasiotes 11y ago
  In the particular case, this jury has two missing whites and a full extra "hispanic", so swapping the hispanic out for a white would improve everything. The other missing white is filled in for by a partially-black partially-Asian guy.
• geomark 11y ago
  Indeed. One jury is far too small a sample size to draw any conclusions (too obvious to even state but I did anyway). When comparing proportions (in this case racial makeup of juries versus racial makeup of the population) you want a sample size large enough that you have at least 5 expected cases for each group. In this case the expected cases are the population proportion (p) times the number of jurors (n). So you would need n * p >= 5 and since Asians are the lowest proportion at 5% you would need data on at least 100 jurors. Then you could do a Chi-square goodness-of-fit test to see if something is really going on. If it seems like I'm being geeky it's only because I just recently worked on a problem exactly like this, determining if jury demographics matched population demographics. Turns out in many cases there IS something going on, but then the reasons for it aren't always what you think. One reason is that in some communities there is a shortage of eligible jurors due to high rates of felony convictions.