White and Black Americans Read ‘Reasonable Doubt’ Differently, National Survey Finds

America’s courts ask jurors to decide guilt using two deceptively simple phrases: “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal trials and “preponderance of the evidence” in civil ones. Neither standard is defined for jurors in most jurisdictions, a deliberate legal choice that leaves interpretation to the individual minds in the jury box. A new study published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice suggests that those individual minds are not interchangeable. Drawing on a nationally representative online survey of 1,193 jury-eligible U.S. adults, researchers Michael A. Hansen of the University of Turku and John C. Navarro of Sam Houston State University found that White and Black Americans interpret the standards of proof in measurably different ways, and that the two groups hold sharply divergent views about which racial compositions of juries can be trusted to deliver impartial verdicts.

The study’s quantitative findings are striking. When asked to attach a percentage certainty to “beyond a reasonable doubt,” respondents on average chose 82.88 percent, while “preponderance of the evidence” received 71.32 percent. But the averages concealed a racial divide: White respondents assigned 84.20 percent certainty to the criminal standard, compared with 76.49 percent for Black respondents. For the civil standard, White respondents chose 72.47 percent while Black respondents chose 66.65 percent. In other words, Black respondents applied lower quantitative thresholds to both standards, even as they interpreted the qualitative meaning of the criminal standard more strictly.

That qualitative pattern emerged clearly in the survey’s binary-choice questions, which mimicked the yes-or-no decisions jurors actually face. Black respondents were roughly 10 percent more likely than White respondents to say that “beyond a reasonable doubt” means there is no possibility that someone else committed the crime, and about 12 percent more likely to equate the standard with absolute certainty of guilt. Nearly 60 percent of Black respondents equated the standard with certainty of guilt, compared with about 48 percent of White respondents. Conversely, Black respondents were about 10 percent less likely to agree that “preponderance of the evidence” requires numerous pieces of evidence, reflecting a more lenient reading of the civil threshold. Notably, the survey questions were deliberately race-neutral, containing no references to defendants or case facts, so the differences cannot be attributed to racial priming.

The authors frame these divergences with two theoretical lenses. Cultural cognition theory holds that people filter evidence through the values of their group identities, interpreting identical information in ways that reinforce pre-existing commitments. Previous research in this tradition showed that jurors with hierarchical, individualistic values and those with egalitarian, communitarian values reached opposite conclusions about a police officer’s use of deadly force, each side convinced its reading reflected what a “reasonable person” would think. More recent observational work found that Black jurors in diverse mock juries took the lead in unpacking what “beyond a reasonable doubt” meant, grounding their interpretations in lived experiences with police. The new survey extends this logic to the general public, suggesting that racial identity, like ideology, shapes how legal thresholds are understood before a trial even begins.

The second framework, critical race theory, makes a more structural claim: that facially neutral legal standards can encode the perspective of the dominant racial group as the universal one. The canonical phrasing of “beyond a reasonable doubt” traces to the 1850 trial of Harvard professor John Webster, articulated by a White judge and applied by what was most likely an all-White jury. From this perspective, the “reasonable person” of American law reflects a culturally specific, predominantly White viewpoint, and the courtroom itself has historically functioned as a White space. The study’s jury-composition findings align with this account. Black respondents expressed significantly greater confidence than White respondents in the impartiality of racially diverse juries, rating them 5.88 versus 4.05 on a 0-to-10 agreement scale, and in all-Black juries, rating them 4.72 versus 2.98.

The all-Black jury results produced the largest racial gap in the entire study, and they fill a conspicuous gap in the literature, since all-Black juries are rarely examined given their infrequency. White respondents rated all-White and all-Black juries nearly identically, a narrow range the authors suggest may reflect social desirability concerns, a weaker perceived connection to systemic discrimination, or a colorblind belief that race plays little role in legal settings. Black respondents, by contrast, displayed a same-race affinity effect that White respondents did not show. Both groups agreed that racially diverse juries were the most impartial of the three compositions, but for potentially different reasons: White respondents may associate diversity with procedural fairness, while Black respondents may see it as a corrective to historical and ongoing exclusion from jury service.

The study’s historical grounding gives these numbers particular weight. In Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court barred prosecutors from striking jurors on the basis of race, yet imposed no constitutional requirement that juries mirror their communities. The persistence of racial exclusion is illustrated by Flowers v. Mississippi, in which a single White prosecutor struck 41 of 42 prospective Black jurors across six trials of Curtis Flowers, a Black man. All-White and majority-White juries returned guilty verdicts and death sentences, while more diverse juries deadlocked. Against this backdrop, the authors argue, jury composition is not a cosmetic detail but a structural variable that shapes how reasonableness and proof are interpreted, and how verdicts are reached.

The findings also complicate the long-standing ideal of the jury trial as the gold standard of American adjudication. Prior research has shown that Black jurors are less likely than White jurors to vote guilty on the first ballot, and that non-White Americans report lower confidence in the fairness of courts. The new study suggests these patterns may partly stem from different baseline understandings of what conviction actually requires. If jurors enter the room with different thresholds for guilt, deliberations may unfold very differently depending on who is seated. The authors note that even where racial differences reached statistical significance in only two of five definitions tested, they remain meaningful because potential jurors carry these interpretations into real trials, where they can influence both deliberation dynamics and outcomes.

Methodologically, the study improves on a legacy of student and localized samples that has long limited jury research. Participants were recruited through Prolific with stratification by age, gender, and political affiliation, and platform records were cross-verified against self-reported demographics. The survey also addressed a neglected area: although civil trials comprise nearly one-fourth of all trials, most empirical work has focused exclusively on “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The authors caution that replication is essential, and they outline future directions including conjoint experiments varying defendant race, oversampling of Black Americans, and comparisons of jurors with and without actual service experience. They also suggest that local samples could capture community-specific interpretations, particularly given that voir dire templates omit standardized definitions of the standards and that slight changes in legal phrasing measurably alter public understanding.

The broader implication is that the phrase “a jury of your peers” carries more weight than legal doctrine typically acknowledges. Perceptions of proof and impartiality diverge along racial lines rather than converging on a shared institutional ideal, and juries, particularly racially diverse ones, appear to be viewed as more accountable to peers than courts are as institutions. For White Americans, diversity may signal procedural legitimacy; for Black Americans, it may help counteract longstanding mistrust rooted in historical exclusion. As the authors conclude, an American courtroom historically structured as a White space undermines the ideal of juries as representative bodies, while racial diversity offers a counterweight, and the public’s confidence in just outcomes may ultimately depend on whether legal standards are understood, not merely announced.

Subject of Research: Racial differences in public interpretations of standards of proof and perceived jury impartiality in the U.S. criminal justice system

Article Title: Racial Differences in Interpretations of Standards of Proof and Jury Impartiality in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

Article References: Hansen, M. A., & Navarro, J. C. (2026). Racial Differences in Interpretations of Standards of Proof and Jury Impartiality in the U.S. Criminal Justice System. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-026-09949-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12103-026-09949-5

Keywords: standards of proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, preponderance of the evidence, jury impartiality, jury composition, racial differences, criminal justice, cultural cognition theory, critical race theory, juror decision making, American Journal of Criminal Justice, jury deliberations