In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that using race as a reason to remove potential jurors is unconsititutional. Despite this ruling, a large disparity in juror strike rates across races appears to remain. This disparity is the center of the 2019 U.S. Supreme Court case "Flowers v. Mississippi", where it was ruled that the District Attorney Doug Evans from the Fifth Circuit Court District in Mississippi had discriminated based on race during jury selection in the six trials of Curtis Flowers.

To support the case, APM Reports collected and published court records of jury strikes in the Fifth Circuit Court District and conducted analysis to assess if there was a systematic racial bias in jury selection in this district. As part of their analyses, they used a logistic regression model and concluded that there was significant racial disparity in jury strike rates by the State, even after accounting for other factors in the dataset.

In addition to assessing overall bias, we aimed to identify subgroups with significant racial disparity. We trained an Optimal Classification Tree and conducted statistical tests between black and non-black jurors in each subgroup. We obtained two groups where there were no differences (those that have been accused of a crime, or have reservation about death penalty).

The remaining groups show significant disparity. For example, among jurors that have not been accused of crimes but know the defendant, there is an over 60% difference in struck rate between black and non-black.

These subgroups suggest systemic patterns of racial bias in the strike process, and provide direct characterizations of the situations in which black jurors are likely to have experienced discrimination.