They, the Jury

THE LAW

Every trial lawyer knows that jurors often start out with prejudices against the defendant or plaintiff. By using his rights to challenge prospective jurors, a lawyer can try to obtain a jury with as little prejudice as possible against his client. To help lawyers assess prospective jurors, a research team working under the auspices of New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University persuaded some 500 persons of varied backgrounds to take an elaborate test designed to reveal prejudices that might affect their judgment as jurors. The test was set up to detect both "overt" and "covert" prejudices. The findings, released this week, include a lot of surprises about who is, or is not, biased toward whom.

sb RACE. In view of the national turmoil about discrimination against Negroes, it is remarkable that the study uncovered very little anti-Negro prejudice. Negroes showed detectable biases against the successful and the established--business executives, for example. Negroes also show biases in favor of the young, the poor and the unemployed.

sb RELIGION. The people tested revealed, as prospective jurors, almost no prejudice against Roman Catholics, Jews, or any of the old, established Protestant denominations. In contrast, many people in many diverse walks of life showed at least covert prejudice against "Ad-ventists/Jehovah's Witnesses" (the researchers lumped them together as a single category).

sb OCCUPATION. The occupational groups against which prejudice is most widespread are government officials and labor union executives. The most prejudiced occupational group among those covered in the study: salesmen, by far. The salesmen, as a group, showed virtually no overt prejudices, but they revealed secret prejudices against the unemployed, people with low incomes and people of Latin or Eastern European origins. The findings also indicate that, as jurors, salesmen tend to be prejudiced in favor of women.

sb INCOME. Those with low incomes are often prejudiced against the highly prosperous, and vice versa; so people in the middle, earning from $7,500 to $15,000, are less likely to meet with prejudice than those above or below them in the income scale.

sb SEX. Women stand somewhat less chance than men of getting a fair verdict from a jury, because two large groups tend to be biased against women: 1) men earning less than $5,000 a year and 2) women.

sb AGE. People in their 30s are less prejudiced than those younger or older. The most prejudice-prone of all the categories covered by the study: the retired.

sb NATIONAL ORIGINS. While discovering much less racial and religious prejudice than might have been expected, the study also revealed remarkably pervasive biases against people who trace their origins to Eastern or Southern Europe. Of the 14 nationality groups covered in the test, the one that aroused the most widespread prejudice of all was "Rumanians/Hungarians" (the study grouped them in a single category). It would appear that if a Rumanian-born woman who is a Seventh-Day Adventist gets involved in a damage suit, she would do well to settle out of court.

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