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A Process Evaluation and Demographic Analysis of Jury Pool Formation in North Carolina’s Judicial District 15B (Sep 2016)

“Our evaluation includes documenting the individual steps in each of the three main parts of the process for forming jury pools: (1) the development and distribution of lists of jury-eligible individuals by the state to individual counties, (2) the cleaning and preparation of the lists at the county level, and (3) the related county-level jury pool–selection and summons process. After discussion of the statewide process, our evaluation focuses exclusively on the county-level process used in Chatham and Orange counties.”“Individuals who identified as Hispanic or Latino were slightly overrepresented in Chatham’s survey results and slightly underrepresented in Orange’s results. However, the percentages were fairly close to the corresponding Census Bureau estimates for voting-age Hispanic or Latino citizens, and those citizens’ relatively small share of each county’s population meant that the overall effect was slim. For example, the underrepresentation in Orange County amounted to about five fewer potential jurors out of almost 750 surveyed… The median reported household income among Chatham County respondents was $64,500 per year, while it was $90,000 per year among Orange County respondents. In Chatham, respondents with household incomes of at least $100,000 outnumbered respondents with incomes less than $25,000 by a ratio of two to one; in Orange, that ratio was almost eight to one.”