Race-Based Jury Instructions: An Empirical Test of Recommendations From R. v. Barton (2019) and R. v. Chouhan (2021)

The majority decisions in two recent Supreme Court of Canada cases (R. v. Barton, 2019; R. v. Chouhan, 2021) recommended that jury instructions be used as a method to counteract potential racial bias in the courtroom. This study sought to test the effectiveness of these recommended instructions, including general antibias instructions provided by the National Judicial Institute and the more specialized race-based instructions recommended by the Court, compared with control instructions that did not mention race, in trials involving racialized accused and victims. Community-member participants (N = 1,091) recruited from Prolific Academic watched an audiovisual trial presentation involving a White/Black/Indigenous accused and victim in which the judge provided one of three types of instructions (control/general race-based/general and specialized race-based), then made verdict decisions. Results reflect recent experimental jury research trends toward nonsignificant differences as a function of accused race and/or increased harshness toward White accused. However, we observed two counterintuitive effects of the modified instructions. The general antibias instructions invoked increased leniency toward an accused with an Indigenous victim, and the general antibias plus specialized race-based instructions invoked harshness in conditions with White accused and racialized victims. These results suggest that more work is needed to investigate these instructions before their implementation and that the Court may wish to explore other avenues for racial bias reduction.