Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Women Whacking Women

No, not the latest reality tv show. Just Anne Reed’s find at Deliberations of a study showing that women are harsher than men in penalizing successful women in civil and, presumably, criminal trials. Anne’s pointing out the clear implications for attorneys picking juries, but don’t findings like these raise serious questions of bias that should be considered by academics studying disparity as well as trial attorneys? Is simply alerting the attorneys doing voir dire enough? If people can be eliminated for opposing the death penalty, shouldn’t they be eliminated for looking at the plantiff/victim or defendant and thinking “Die, Martha Stewart, die”?

Seriously.

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