You then have the same issues as with electronic voting. How can you be sure your 'fair' algorithm is running for each individual court case? That it hasn't be

You then have the same issues as with electronic voting. How can you be sure your 'fair' algorithm is running for each individual court case? That it hasn't been tampered with, swapped out, hacked or otherwise changed? Do you give the entire court room the ability to look at the machine and what it's running? How do you then stop any of them messing around with it when you're not looking? You've then got the unfortunate implications that an automated system might create. Okay, the court system very much isn't neutral in regards to race, wealth, gender, nationality, religion or anything else. How do you stop an automated system discriminating based on those factors? Because there are probably different statistics and likelyhoods of different groups committing crimes. And there are various other issues too. Do you trust a small group of people, a company, some open source contributors or an individual to program a system to make 'fairer' decisions than a country's worth of judges? Because the amount of factors that go into a court case means that a piece of software has to deal with a thousands or even millions of possibilities. Which provide a place for an unscrupulous, lazy or shortsighted programmer to screw things up. And there's also the old trust issue. People tend to trust other people more than machines, especially those seemingly associated with a faceless corporation, large government or unknown force. A system that replaces people, no matter how good the algorithm, would get a lot of bad press in this sort of situation. People won't be happy about being sentenced to prison by a computer program. Heck, even a judge using a smartphone app would cause an uproar about how 'soulless technology is replacing human intuition' or something similar. As for trying to make human judges blind to race and gender. That's its own challenge. Facial expressions and courtroom behaviour can indicate whether someone is guilty or not about as much as what they actually say. Try and anonymise that, and you end up in a situation where those who can act regretful over the phone/without being soon have an advantage over those that can't. There are also situations where being blind to race and gender would be a bad thing. Economic information can cause bias, but it can also be used to treat a defendant more fairly as well. If someone was really poor/starving on the streets and stole to stay alive, shouldn't that be indicated somehow? There's a difference between someone like that and a rich guy who stole because he was bored or wanted more.