Category: Rights, Justice, & Judgement

Opinion: Courts should pause the use of algorithms for criminal sentencing.

Currently, courts and corrections departments around the US use algorithms to determine a defendant’s “risk”, which ranges from the probability that an individual will commit another crime to the likelihood a defendant will appear for his or her court date. These algorithmic outputs inform decisions about bail, sentencing, and parole. Each tool aspires to improve on the accuracy of human decision-making that allows for a better allocation of finite resources.

Typically, government agencies do not write their own algorithms; they buy them from private businesses. This often means the algorithm is proprietary or “black boxed”, meaning only the owners, and to a limited degree the purchaser, can see how the software makes decisions.

This lack of transparency has real consequences.

how does a judge weigh the validity of a risk-assessment tool if she cannot understand its decision-making process?

To accept AI in our courts without a plan is to defer to machines in a way that should make any advocate of judicial or prosecutorial discretion uncomfortable.

Source: Courts Are Using AI to Sentence Criminals. That Must Stop Now | WIRED, by Jason Tashea

What matters is people’s lives. The law was not written for lawyers but for the whole of the people.

Source: Al Franken’s grilling of Gorsuch exposes the heartless cruelty behind conservative legal philosophy – Salon.com

in a lot of areas—anti-discrimination law, for example, or medical care, to name just two—religious claims involve the rights of many different people, each of whom has a claim to freedom of conscience. Those claims don’t depend on formal labels or church membership; and they all must be weighed in the balance. Balancing is hard, subjective, and ultimately often unsatisfying; yet balancing is the soul of constitutional law.

In the United States, whose culture and history has been shaped by Christianity, it’s easy to skip the balancing stage. Many people assume that “religious freedom” centers around familiar “religious” beliefs—Christianity, in other words—as opposed to those of religious outsiders, whether they are Mormons, Muslims, or atheists.

Source: Gorsuch’s Selective View of ‘Religious Freedom’ – The Atlantic

Why is free speech important? When free speech comes into conflict with other values, why should free speech win?

I aspire here to tl;dr Mill’s work, and present his urgent and living reasons that free speech is important, and why it should weigh heavily against other values.

Source: Why is Freedom of Speech Important? | The View from Hell

RE: “On Liberty”, Chapter 2: “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”, by John Stuart Mill, 1859

The case raises issues about privacy and the government use of informants. If a customer turns over their computer for repair, do they forfeit their expectation of privacy, and their Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches? And if an informant is paid, does it compromise their credibility or effectively convert them into an agent of the government?

Best Buy spokesman Jeff Shelman … “Any circumstances in which an employee received payment from the FBI is the result of extremely poor individual judgment, is not something we tolerate and is certainly not a part of our normal business behavior.”

Source: If a Best Buy technician is a paid FBI informant, are his computer searches legal? – The Washington Post