Random Selection of Petit Jurors on the Virginia Frontier, 1746-55

Eighteenth-century English common-law courts used petit juries in civil litigation to try issues of fact or find damages after defendants defaulted. In colonial Virginia, county sheriffs impaneled potential jurors for trials of the issue; before trial, litigants selected a 12-man jury during voir dire. By contrast, juries on writs of inquiry to ascertain damages were selected solely by sheriffs and reached verdicts under the sheriff's supervision. Scholarly consensus holds juror selection to have been prejudiced, but pure probability predictions generated with hypergeometric distributions indicate that on writs of inquiry sheriffs often picked jurors in a functionally random manner. This article presents a new test for identifying bias in jury selection by identifying improbable numbers of magistrates, constables, and grand jurors.