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Jury Selection in Erie County: Changing a Sexist System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Adeline Gordon Levine  and
Claudine Schweber-Koren
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Abstract

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Prior to January 1974, jury selection procedures violating basic standards of randomness had resulted in juries in Erie County, New York, which were overwhelmingly male. This paper describes the biased selection procedures, their discovery by volunteers engaged in a project to ensure a fair trial for prison inmates under indictment for events occurring in the Attica uprising, and the consequences of both improved procedures and an amended law for sexual equality in jury selection.

Two linkages between law and society are explored. First, the existence of a “woman's exemption” had led the jury commissioner and staff to make systematic prejudgments about women's behavior which then resulted in their underrepresentation on juries. Second, lawyers and social scientists worked together, using procedures and concepts from both disciplines to achieve a goal of mutual interest: improvement of the methods of jury selection, so that jury composition would more closely resemble the composition of the community. Possibilities and problems of social scientists working with lawyers are described briefly.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Fall 1976 , pp. 43 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

*

The authors want to thank Crucian Messina who took office as Erie County Jury Commissioner in October, 1973. Mr. Messina supervised the changes in selection procedures described in this paper. He and his deputy commissioner, Matilda Garner Smith, cooperated with the Fair Jury Project researchers, as well as with the authors of this paper.

References

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