Death Qualification and Jury Bias

Jury members are supposed to be carefully selected for trial juries, but can we really prevent biases from getting in the way? Some trials or lawyers call for a process known as "death qualification". This is whenever a jury member shows clear bias against the death penalty and is therefore no longer able to serve on that jury (Markus et al. 492).

Just by looking at this description of death qualification we can already begin to see where problems with this attempt at bias reduction occur. Some may argue that death qualification is effective in rooting out clear biases, while others may argue its seemingly arbitrary nature of such a "qualification". Cannot the jurors who vote in favor of the death penalty also be more biased in the opposing circumstance, more easily convicting a person based on their positive attitude towards the death penalty?

There was a recent article produced by the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 2010 that related to the death qualification process. Since I was not able to directly read the article from their website, I instead read a blog about the Journal Article which proved very shocking to me.

The blog of course talked about the religious bias and how juries qualify based on level of religious experience (Keenetrial.com). Then, the blog proceeded to explain how death qualification also comes from gender and race. The blog describes the following about the article:

"Gender and race predicted death qualification while age and prior jury experience did not. Women and racial minorities were more likely to be excluded from juries."(Keenetrial.com)

One would normally assume that death qualification only applies to morally or religiously obligated individuals, but from the above statement we can tell that this is no longer the case. If the goal is to try to keep bias out of the jury's process of conviction, then perhaps this is the reason why this study was conducted--to see if there are any other factors that predict death qualification. Yet, while conducting this study, I think that determining these biases could seem biased themselves which can upset people who wish to serve on juries.

The rest is up to us to decide, to fill in the gaps of what we don't know and what we hope to know about death qualification. Do you think there is validity in the death qualification process? Are there any other biases you think death qualifications should consider? I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject. It is very interesting and controversial!

Sources:
Markus, Kassin, and Fein. Social Psychology. 8th ed. 2008. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2011. Print.
Journal Article
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2010.00698.x/full
Blog About Article
http://keenetrial.com/blog/2011/01/31/does-death-qualification-systematically-bias-our-juries/