Racial Biases in Death Penalties

      There have been so many wrongful convictions in the past mainly due to racial biases that exist within jurors. There are factors that play a role in convictions that are not right such as misinterpretations in visual information and racial biases due to in-groups and out-groups. This was studied in the study by Yael Granot titled “Looking for trouble: An attention intervention for group-based bias in appraisals of video evidence”. Through the research they conducted, they found that both of these factors contributed to the decisions that jurors made when finding a person guilty of a crime. Visual information can be interpreted differently by every individual leading them to see one individual as more guilty even if they may not be, especially when the video evidence or any other evidence is ambiguous. Racial bias also plays a role in people being more biased towards groups that are racially different than them (out-groups) versus the same or similar racial groups to them (in-groups)

     Racial justice acts have come out to defend individuals that have been sentenced if the sentence was driven by racial bias. The passing of these acts, in the past, has helped to remove inmates from death row and give them life without parole instead. However, since the repeal of this act in 2013 four inmates are back on death row. In 2017, a judge dismissed their cases without hearing the evidence claiming that since the Racial Justice Act had been overturned, the inmates racial bias cases should be overturned as well. In August of 2019, the cases were going to be back before the State supreme court to evaluate and have a debate on what should be done. This news article talks about how at the time of the convictions the jurors that convicted these individuals were mainly White and many Blacks were struck out of the jury. This article talked about how there was evidence of racial bias in each individual case. This racial bias needs to be accounted for when looking at how a jury decides on the sentence for an individual. When the jurors are more racially diverse this helps in diminishing racial biases that can occur.

                                                                   References

      https://time.com/5659100/north-carolina-death-penalty/

      Granot, Y., Balcetis, E., Schneider, K. E., & Tyler, T. R. (2014). Justice is not blind: Visual attention exaggerates effects of group identification on legal punishment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(6), 2196-2208. doi: 10.1037/a0037893