Question 8.93

8.93 Statistics and the law

Casteneda v. Partida is an important court case in which statistical methods were used as part of a legal argument. When reviewing this case, the Supreme Court used the phrase “two or three standard deviations” as a criterion for statistical significance. This Supreme Court review has served as the basis for many subsequent applications of statistical methods in legal settings. (The two or three standard deviations referred to by the Court are values of the statistic and correspond to -values of approximately 0.05 and 0.0026.) In Casteneda the plaintiffs alleged that the method for selecting juries in a county in Texas was biased against Mexican Americans.22 For the period of time at issue, there were 181,535 persons eligible for jury duty, of whom 143,611 were Mexican Americans. Of the 870 people selected for jury duty, 339 were Mexican Americans.

  1. What proportion of eligible jurors were Mexican Americans? Let this value be .
  2. Let be the probability that a randomly selected juror is a Mexican American. The null hypothesis to be tested is . Find the value of for this problem, compute the statistic, and find the -value. What do you conclude? (A finding of statistical significance in this circumstance does not constitute proof of discrimination. It can be used, however, to establish a prima facie case. The burden of proof then shifts to the defense.)
  3. We can reformulate this exercise as a two-sample problem. Here, we wish to compare the proportion of Mexican Americans among those selected as jurors with the proportion of Mexican Americans among those not selected as jurors. Let be the probability that a randomly selected juror is a Mexican American, and let be the probability that a randomly selected nonjuror is a Mexican American. Find the statistic and -value. How do your answers compare with your results in part (b)?

    454

8.93

(a) . (b) . The data show evidence that the proportion of jurors selected who are Mexican American is significantly less than 79.1% (the percent of Mexican Americans in the population). (c) . The answer is nearly identical to part (b).