Talk:Death-qualified jury

Sources regarding the effect of a Witherspooned jury

Does anyone have any sources to cite as to the effect of a Witherspooned jury? The article states that this has the effects of excluding women and minorities. Any sources for this? And should a comment be added that a juror must also be able to consider a life sentence. Nolamgm 05:06, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

-In particular is the exclusion of minorities disproportionate - locally? or nationally? That is minorities are minorities because they are smaller fraction of the population. However, biased use of quotes and even studies themselves have been known to scream bias based minorities representation which is in fact in excess of their percentage of population. That is equality in some minds means 50% black juries nationally even when nationally blacks are only around 16-18% of US population.

-Representation of cultures on juries is probably driven in many states by the numbers of people on tax rolls, etc versus desire to discriminate. In some cases the under-represented are intentionally trying to stay off the government grid,including jury duty. Do we have any studies which indicate if this is in fact the case?

-I suspect juries are short on Hispanics due to issues of illegal immigrant. If widely accepted studies are correct 1/3 to 1/2 of Hispanics in US are illegal or have questionable documentation. The US census is quite willing to count most Hispanics without little documentation, that is without bias to letter of the law. Courts are of course another matter and illegals likely also fear courtrooms disproportionately to actual risk.

-The sex bias is not surprising as a matter of cultural roles fewer married women are probably on tax rolls as husband may be sufficient. Also due to cultural conditioning women are more likely to be disqualified (i.e. the ability to make pacts with bitter social enemies is still in US female society). But it would be nice to see any studies that objectively verify women coming in as jury candidates and any inadvertent screening by that process versus processes eliminating female candidates considered for jury durty. 99.73.20.52 (talk) 01:47, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Rehabilitate

From the article:

A party may attempt to rehabilitate the juror by asking questions about whether they would consider the death penalty.

Can somebody change rehabilitate to a different word or link it to someplace? Right now, it links to rehabilitation a disambig page. I do not know where it would go, I'm thinking it may go in Rehabilitation penology) but that talks about rehabiliting prisoners. Or maybe this is a definition, so it should be linked to wikitionary.

The word is correct. That is what it is called. However, I agree the link does not make any sense. Nolamgm 03:53, 25 March 2006 (UTC)