Detecting racial bias in jury selection

DOI10.1007/S43069-022-00151-XMaRDI QIDQ2167656zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Jack Dunn, Ying Daisy Zhuo

Publication date 25 August 2022

Published in SN Operations Research Forum (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11852

zbMATH Keywords

bias detectiondecision treesinterpretable machine learningsparse regression

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Learning and adaptive systems in artificial intelligence (68T05) Decision theory (91B06) Individual preferences (91B08)

Abstract: To support the 2019 U.S. Supreme Court case "Flowers v. Mississippi", APM Reports collated historical court records to assess whether the State exhibited a racial bias in striking potential jurors. This analysis used backward stepwise logistic regression to conclude that race was a significant factor, however this method for selecting relevant features is only a heuristic, and additionally cannot consider interactions between features. We apply Optimal Feature Selection to identify the globally-optimal subset of features and affirm that there is significant evidence of racial bias in the strike decisions. We also use Optimal Classification Trees to segment the juror population subgroups with similar characteristics and probability of being struck, and find that three of these subgroups exhibit significant racial disparity in strike rate, pinpointing specific areas of bias in the dataset.

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Cites work

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Cited in

(4)

• Hypothesis testing when data sources are uncertain
• What can we learn about the racial gap in the presence of sample selection?
• Racial bias in bail decisions
• Bayesian Detection of Bias in Peremptory Challenges Using Historical Strike Data

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