Legal Dictionary of Pakistan

absolute disparity

Constitutional law. The difE,rence between the percentage of a group in ~i;e general population and the percentage of ;.tat group in the pool of prospective jurors on a venire. * For example, if African-Americans make up 12% of a county's population and 8% of the potential jurors on a venire, the absolute disparity of African-American veniremembers is 4%. The reason for calculating the disparity is to analyze a claim that the jury was not impartial because the venire from which it was chosen did not represent a fair cross-section of the jurisdiction's population. Some courts criticize the absolute-disparity analysis, favoring instead the comparative-disparity analysis, in the belief that the absolute-disparity analysis understates the deviation. See FAIR-CROSS-SECTION REQUIREMENT; DUREN TEST; STATISTICAL-DECISION THEORY. Cf. COMPARATIVE DISPARITY.