Question

Statistics and the law. Castaneda 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 z statistic and correspond to P-values of approximately 0.05 and 0.0026.) In Castaneda, the plaintiffs alleged that the method for selecting juries in a county in Texas was biased against Mexican Americans. 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 pₒ.

Answer 1

The proportion of eligible jurors who were Mexican Americans was approximately 0.7911 or 79.11%.

Step-by-step explanation:

The proportion of eligible jurors who were Mexican Americans in Castaneda v. Partida can be calculated by dividing the number of Mexican Americans eligible for jury duty by the total number of persons eligible for jury duty. Using the provided numbers:

Proportion (p₀) = Number of Mexican Americans eligible for jury duty / Total number of persons eligible for jury duty:

p₀ = 143,611 / 181,535

p₀ = 0.7911 (rounded to four decimal places)

So, approximately 79.11% of the eligible jurors were Mexican Americans.