9 ms·

Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

137 points by fraqed 10y ago

jdminhbg 10y ago
A lot of the discussion around this seems to focus on football, but that's just the easily-measurable proxy for a bad mood the authors found. Presumably an argument with a spouse, a poker game loss, a parking ticket, or a bad interaction with a coffee clerk would have the same effect. It's disheartening that justice is so capricious, but setting sentences through the legislature seems even more fraught. I don't have a good solution.
- laurent123456 10y ago
  Maybe simple cases could some day be automatically handled by a computer, in which case the judgement will be completely impartial. Initially they could be trained in parallel to real judges to see if the judgements more or less match and to detect errors.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    You don't want "impartial" judgements this is how martial law works, the legal system has to take circumstances into account unless you want to the days where we used to send people to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. You can't teach computers empathy and empathy is part of our legal system for better or for worse.
    - jnbiche 10y ago
      > empathy is part of our legal system I don't see evidence of much empathy in the US justice system.
      - mikeash 10y ago
        Brock Turner is a recent high-profile example of it (in a bad way), although that sort of thing may be uncommon.
      - at-fates-hands 10y ago
        Have you ever had to deal with the system on any level?
        jnbiche 10y ago
        Yes, have you?
        at-fates-hands 10y ago
        Yeap. My experiences have been pretty positive in that I was able to avoid jail time or anything going on my record that I would have to explain to a potential employer. For the minor stuff I've been to court on that I handled myself, I've always gone in a suit and tie and been very respectful to the DA. Both times, he basically put me on probation and then told me to get out of his court. The other times I've been to court and required an attorney, I took the financial hit in order to avoid having to go through the system. Again, every time I was able to get out unscathed. I had decent attorneys that were able to make deals with the DA's for reduced sentencing, longer probation, etc. Everything was usually done before I actually had to appear in court. So shy of being incarcerated and having to go through the system (arrest, posting bail, court appearance, and having to serve jail time) I've had fairly positive experiences. You?
      - Larrikin 10y ago
        The color of your skin still plays a major role in determining the amount of empathy you'll get
    - dmix 10y ago
      > unless you want to the days where we used to send people to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. I found out this actually happens recently (if you have a record in Canada). A recent client of my lawyer partner had a past record ( domestic abuse and one more minor crime) and went to prison for stealing about $15-20 of food because he was hungry. Regardless I know what you're saying. But there may still be the potential for a computer in the future which can analyze the context of the past thousands and thousands of human judge cases with machine learning algorithms. So it's not just a literal interpretation of law. The challenge is establishing parameters such as previous record, age, grievousness of crime, etc. The goal is to provide a balance to human emotion. Maybe the solution here is providing that to judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys through technology.
    - laurent123456 10y ago
      That's why I wrote "simple cases" and circumstances could be taken into account as long as the software has access to the person's criminal record, family situation, job, etc. Empathy in the end comes from knowing about the person's background and, assuming it's possible to provide this information to a software program, it could make a decision as good, and maybe better, than a judge (if anything, that will allow the judge to spend time on more complicated cases). Also it's well known that, for instance, less attractive people get harsher sentences, and machines will be completely immune to this kind of bias.
      - dogma1138 10y ago
        We can't get a machine to recommend a movie accurately atm you want it to case judgement? And there are solutions for less attractive people getting harsher sentences, I think the jury sitting with their backs to the courtroom isn't a bad idea, or not even being in the same room at all.
        laurent123456 10y ago
        A human also cannot accurately recommend a movie, which means it's not as trivial a task as it seems. Anyway, an algorithm judgement should not be blindly trusted, and there should be plenty of checks to make sure someone doesn't accidentally get NaN years of detention, but it could have its use.
    - Veedrac 10y ago
      > You don't want "impartial" judgements Why? Your argument seems to be that without empathy in the legal system people would go to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. That doesn't really make sense, My argument would be that with empathy in the legal system, unlikeable people from the wrong minority with an unhappy judge would go to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. There is so much disproportionality in the legal system that has arisen from gut feelings and a lack of objectivity - not just obvious things like racism but even just some crimes having far harsher punishments than more damaging ones because they're easier to get angry about. Formalizing things like reduced punishments for crimes with lower damage (aka. bread is cheap) or born of necessity (aka. the thief can't afford food) seems so trivial a concern in comparison. Obviously formalizing more complex issues is also hard, but the bar to beat isn't set particularly high.
      - hackuser 10y ago
        I agree there are many problems with injecting human judgment, but also many benefits. It's not all or nothing. We don't want to simply replace one set of problems with another.
      - dogma1138 10y ago
        How would you formalize it without it being exploitable? And what about other things, how about a father who killed the man who raped his daughter? Or a woman who hired some one to kill her abusive partner? How would you estimate damage? it's easy to do with itemised goods but how do you estimate the damage of being abused, raped, how do you put a value on someone's life? These are things we haven't even managed to fully grasp and defined yet, and you want us to define that to a computer? How are you going to form a legal argument that can lead to a new precedent to a computer?
        mangeletti 10y ago
        Certainly not with Ethereum :) Of course what I just said is kind of comical at first glance, but in all honesty, and to absolutely agree with and add to your point, the exploits related to Ethereum are great examples of how something seemingly infallible that is set in stone can easily turn out to be an Achilles' heel, which then, just like in the case of Ethereum, requires human intervention, bringing it back full circle. Also, to add to this, as @hackuser mentions[1], the system, even if set perfectly in stone, will still be based on somebody's biases. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12462653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12462653
    - pc86 10y ago
      I'm pretty opposed to having computers issuing legal judgments for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that I spend a pretty large part of my day surrounded by government-written and government-sponsored software. But if we were going to go that route eventually, perhaps a system where a judge is provided the "impartial" judgment as additional information or where the decisions are reviewed by a judge before sentencing and could be lessened/cancelled but not increased?
      - dogma1138 10y ago
        We could have a different definition of "impartial", there is a difference between a judge being impartial by not allowing outside interference which is not related to the direct matter and subject of the case from influencing their judgement. However we do take account for both the letter and the spirit of the law when making a judgment, and we take account of the circumstances and the nature of the crime, the offenders and the offended parties. We also make arguments based on the spirit of the law that do appeal to our human nature and empathy at large and this is a very important part of our legal system. You would not want to see a judicial system where this isn't possible, you see this usually under martial law and other authoritative regimes were all crimes and all offenders are equal to the law and receive the same and often harsh punishment. Even tho in the US the execution of the legal system might not be perfect, or quite far from it depending on how you look at it the principles of it are pretty important, if was pretty much the first legal system where we said we will not throw people to jail for being in debt, it was one of the few legal systems that did hold itself to higher standards of justice and equality. And you can't have that with computers, not only because you can't teach them those things but because a legal system isn't some static list, it isn't the 10 commandments. Our legal system is a living and breeding organism and judges, arbiters and lawyers are it's organs without them debating and arguing the legal system would "die". You won't have new arguments, you won't have new precedents for the most part the entire legal system would grind to a halt and the only thing you'll have remaining is a penal code. And trust me you do not want to live under a legal system which is in a effect a static and impartial penal code.
      - rayiner 10y ago
        > But if we were going to go that route eventually, perhaps a system where a judge is provided the "impartial" judgment as additional information or where the decisions are reviewed by a judge before sentencing and could be lessened/cancelled but not increased? That is basically what we do in the federal system. Judges have to calculate sentences using a mechanical, point-based system called the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. The judge has discretion to depart from the calculated sentence, but in practice the guideline sentence has a powerful anchoring effect. And it's terrible. Turns out that its much easier to formulate a system with inhumanely long sentences when you're a committee developing an abstract point-scoring system than when you're an individual judge faced with deciding the fate of a living, breathing human in front of you.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
      What do you mean "used to".
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > judgement will be completely impartial It would be just as partial, but instead of the judge's biases it would reflect the preferences of other humans, the software developers and whoever controls them. I think there's a great risk in misrepresenting to the public that computers are somehow impartial, and not representative and under the control of human interests. It's like saying a legal contract is impartial.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Having a panel of judges that is "isolated" from each other outside of the courtroom can help reduce the likelihood of these things happening. Having attentive clerks as well as maybe mandatory psychiatric counseling for judges can also resolve some issues.
  - pc86 10y ago
    I'm not sure what good psychiatric counseling would do? "Oh you had a fight with your spouse last night? You better take a day or two off."
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      Alleviate the psychological pressure that comes from being a judge. Provide an evaluation as to their ability to preside over a case. You can think of plenty of other examples where therapy and counseling might be quite good, i rather not have judges secretly medicating themselves with antidepressants, and judging by statistics alone probably more than a handful of them do.
  - corecoder 10y ago
    What about running these statistics (correlating decisions with day of week, hour of day, etc.) for each judge, and then just tell them: see, in the past year you acted in this not very bright way; maybe you should think about the way you do your job? And, by the way, we'll keep running these statistics on how you judge. Being made aware of our own biases is often the most effective way to make the situation better.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      Could be but statistics are tricky. Hour of day / day of week can easily be skewed by the system at large. For example more bar fights over the weekends, more violent crime during the heat waves in the summer, more prank crimes involving young first time offenders during school breaks (e.g. spring break), more cases of spousal abuse during the holiday season etc. Just having the numbers and saying here you are biased isn't really easy because it might not be possible to actually determine true bias from them.
- brianlweiner 10y ago
  Indeed other research has indicated that lots of factors can affect a judge's decisions. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full A panel of judges would be one approach. Perhaps judges could be made aware of what the average penalty is for similar cases and that would give them an easier anchor for their decision.
  - hobbyjogger 10y ago
    The Danziger study assumed that the order in which the parolees appeared was random, which turned out not to be the case: "Danziger et al. (1) concluded that meal breaks taken by Israeli parole boards influence the boards’ decisions. This conclusion depends on the order of cases being random or at least exogenous to the timing of meal breaks. . . [But] case ordering is not random ...the board tries to complete all cases from one prison before it takes a break and to start with another prison after the break. Within each session, unrepresented prisoners usually go last and are less likely to be granted parole than prisoners with attorneys... [O]ur data indicate a success rate of 67% for prisoners with counsel and 39% for unrepresented prisoners. Excluding deferrals in the authors' data yields very similar success rates, beginning at about 75% and dropping to 42% at the end of a session. Thus, we strongly suspect that the pattern of declining success rates is a result of hearing represented prisoners first and unrepresented prisoners last." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198355/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198355/
    - kahirsch 10y ago
      Note that there is a reply to that letter: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198336/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198336/
  - mattkrause 10y ago
    That paper has some serious issues. On the practical side, the prisoners were ordered. Judges tried to break for meals after processing a whole 'batch' of prisoners from a specific prison. Within a prison block, those with lawyers went before those representing themselves, and lawyers also ordered their cases however they wanted. As you might expect, prisoners having counsel fared better than those without. Additionally, they measured "time elapsed from a meal" in two ways: actual wall time (in hours/minutes/seconds/etc), and case order. Both measures were individually significant, but when both were put into a model, only the ordinal one remained significant. This suggests--to me, at least--that the result isn't due to a physiological process: blood sugar levels vary continuously and don't "jump" from case to case. There was a rebuttal letter in PNAS shortly after it was published. Edit: HobbyJogger covered most of this first. Thanks!
- metaphorm 10y ago
  sentencing by tribunal. maybe one person could be in a bad mood, but all 3 at the same time?
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    When someone at work is in a foul mood, it creates tension and problems that drag everyone down.
- lukeschlather 10y ago
  The solution is restorative justice, where the focus is on repairing the harm rather than punishment. For example, sending a drug addict to prison for 10 years doesn't do anything to alleviate the harm of the crime, and in fact is harmful in and of itself, just in a different way. The law needs to maintain a much closer balance between hurting people and helping people. While hurting criminals does have a deterrent factor, we do have to make sure that after we hurt them we build them back up so they don't reoffend. In the long run, skipping the "build them back up" step is more dangerous than skipping the punishment step. Our laws currently falsely assume that skipping the punishment step is the most dangerous thing to do.
  - koolba 10y ago
    > The solution is restorative justice, where the focus is on repairing the harm rather than punishment. What's the repair/punishment for me smoking a joint on my front porch?
    - zo1 10y ago
      Repair is only applicable when there is victim. The other point is that certain acts can not be meaningfully repaired/repaid within our current societal context. I.e. How do you measure the repayment or actions-required to repair a life that is taken by someone? I would argue indentured servitude is a valid way to go, but it makes people uncomfortable because they see it as slavery. Yet, keeping someone locked up in an unproductive cage, to watch them wither away is somehow "rehabilitating" them. It's not, it's punishing them, it's revenge.
      - cloverich 10y ago
        > Yet, keeping someone locked up in an unproductive cage, to watch them wither away is somehow "rehabilitating" them. I don't think most people claim its rehabilitation. I think the "rehabilitation" angle is political word play and would bet that most people who support harsh prison sentences see it (and support it) as punishment.
- VikingCoder 10y ago
  Well, one thing we have to do for sure is inject tests into the system. Hire actors to play defense, prosecution, etc, without the judge knowing. Change one variable, and see how different judges react. Black, white, male, female, handicapped, etc. Witnesses, victims, defendant. At a minimum, publish scores of Judges, so the public can make informed decisions. Justice has to be blind, or there's no fucking point.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  Getting rid of: mandatory minimums; three-strikes-your-out laws; the drug war generally, the for-profit prison industrial complex generally, and as other have stated, the whole concept of retributive justice generally might go a long way towards those ends.
- funkymike 10y ago
  It doesn't even take a specific event. Don't go in front of a judge just before lunch as their hunger can influence their decisions, likely not in your favor. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110411/full/news.2011.227.html http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110411/full/news.2011.227.ht...
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Given there's research showing harshness increases over time until lunch then dropping markedly, then increasing again over the afternoon this isn't terribly surprising. We're not likely to eliminate these factors any time soon.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > We're not likely to eliminate these factors any time soon. I disagree. Knowing about them can make a big difference, and training can teach people to avoid these errors.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    We can mitigate them to some extent with awareness and training. With research seeming to show subconscious biases remarkably difficult to remove, I sincerely doubt they can be eliminated. We haven't managed it in society and the workplace despite significant legislative effort.
    - hackuser 10y ago
      > I sincerely doubt they can be eliminated. We haven't managed it in society and the workplace despite significant legislative effort. Right. Who made the standard (for anything!) 100% success? But society and the workplace have greatly improved, through social effort and also the resulting legislative one. Just 60 years ago, women were only allowed to be teachers and nurses; not long before that, they needed their husband's permission to get a job and were locked out of higher education for the most part. Now most college graduates are women and most law school graduates are women. 65 years ago the U.S. had segregation! Now a black man is President, the black middle-class has exploded, etc. Look also at attitudes toward race, sexual orientation, religion - look at surveys from the 50s and 60s (and later). In fact, I think the pessimism in the above comment is completely backward. The track record is of amazing revolutions in human affairs.
      - anexprogrammer 10y ago
kldaace 10y ago
I'm going to wait for more replication before I adjust my priors too much on this. It seems plausible prima facie, but I'm suspicious of their methodology. From the article (I don't have access to the working paper), it sounds like they might have been trying to test the significance of a lot of different variables, and this might just be the one that popped up.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  If you have "priors" that you can adjust, that suggests you think you are an explicit Bayesian reasoner. It's incoherent to take on that identity and then ignore new information. You should just conjure probabilities from this incident that will have an acceptably low impact on your priors.
  - kldaace 10y ago
    I'm not ignoring new information, I'm just saying my priors are strong enough and the evidence is weak enough that this won't make me change my beliefs "too much."
nxzero 10y ago
Once had the very surreal experience while in court waiting to litigate a case to object to a higher court's jurisdiction over a case; my motion was granted, and the case was sent to the lower court. While waiting for the above motion to be heard for over an hour, the person directly behind me was calling how the judge would respond to various matters that required the judge's opinion. Having nothing to do, since mobile device weren't allowed, I listened to the predictions made and the outcome. The predictions were wrong most of the time. As I stated earlier, my motion to send the complaint back to the lower court was granted and it turns out that the person behind me was the judge for the lower court. Yes, the lower court was predictably unable to predict the higher court's judgements the majority of the time. To me, this if it holds true statistically across the legal system in a blind test of judges -- it is a major issue; normally, judges don't want to publicly rule against another judge unless it's obvious the other judge was wrong. Strange end to my experience was that I won in the lower court and the other party failed to appeal the judgement in a timely manner; meaning my motion to dismiss the appeal was granted based on it being filed one day late by the opposing party by the higher court. Always wondered what would have happened if the higher court had heard the case and issued a judgement; lucky that never happened.
- acbabis 10y ago
  I was under the impression that you only have multiple courts review a case when the case is appealed. Wouldn't cases that are appealed be biased in favor of unpredictability by the fact that people believed they could be reversed?
  - nxzero 10y ago
    Happy to address the question, but it's not clear to me exactly what the question is. In the example I provided the lower court and court above it shared jurisdiction over the case by law. Generally, upper courts for case load reasons will not hear a case that's not an appeal. In this case, the higher court considered hearing the case based on the arguments of the other party, but I won based on my arguments that as a result of the contract between the parties the lower court was explicitly the only court that had jurisdiction over the matter. For what it's worth, I'm not an attorney, just skilled at legal matters and litigation; as an example, once had a judge issue an order by phone for me and have their clerk draft the order too - ask any attorney if they've ever done that... :-)
romanovcode 10y ago
It's also proven that judges make harsher sentences just before the lunchtime. (Because they're hungry)
- ttkeil 10y ago
  Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full
- dmoy 10y ago
  Parole board also less likely to grant parole right before lunch.
- hiddenkrypt 10y ago
  The study that suggested (not proven) that was found to have some flaws: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463053
deviate_X 10y ago
Human's are rarely rational in a way that could be understood to be accepted as absolute, we are overwhelmingly emotional creatures just like every other creature in existence. So if a young person displeases you, then all such young people will be simply marked as a threat +1 by your brain
finid 10y ago
> That may be acceptable as long as it’s one tool in many, he said, but data shouldn’t drive the entire justice system. Data has always driven all the decisions we make. It's just that in the past, before big data, our personal computers (read: brains) did the data wrangling. By the way, we still do it. It's how humans and other living things employ profiling.
- Terr_ 10y ago
  "The checks and balances of democratic governments were invented because humans themselves realized how unfit they were to govern themselves. They needed a system, yes. An industrial age machine."
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
I generally think a focus on restoring the person to a good citizen is a bonus: There is no point in putting someone with an anger problem in prison if you aren't going to take care of the anger problem while they are there just like it isn't likely that a prison sentence is going to help much if your main problem is that you were nearly starving or addicted to drugs. Nonetheless, I do believe this is where education, information, and standards should come into play. We should expect training so that judges can overcome things like the result of emotions on sentencing. We should have recommendations of standards for sentencing, and public feedback on how the judge tends to lean. With numbers, a particilar judge can know they are more harsh after lunch, more lenient on women, and other such things. They can look to see what the average sentence range is for the basic situation (x-y for first offense: y-z for second, etc). Some folks have mentioned a computer system, and I don't think this is all that bad of an idea if used wisely. More like information and suggested sentencing: First offense? Age? Family? Extenuating circumstances that might require leniency or harshness? and then get a range of recommendations with their effectiveness rates. I do think it is prudent to have sentences seconded by a separate judge, especially if the judge is towards or over the harsher end of the punishments or too far into the leniency. I do think they might get rubber-stamped if not done correctly, but I also think this would get judges to consider outcomes.
888uuii 10y ago
None of this is going to get any easier until widespread recognition of the next objective of humanity as permanently ending human killing and torture gains universal or universally-implementable acceptance.
vireama 10y ago
Hey, buzzard, are you cloth-eared? Come on, look at hotchas here http://rx4ajr.skhit.in/ http://rx4ajr.skhit.in/

137 points by fraqed 10y ago

A lot of the discussion around this seems to focus on football, but that's just the easily-measurable proxy for a bad mood the authors found. Presumably an argument with a spouse, a poker game loss, a parking ticket, or a bad interaction with a coffee clerk would have the same effect. It's disheartening that justice is so capricious, but setting sentences through the legislature seems even more fraught. I don't have a good solution.

laurent123456 10y ago
Maybe simple cases could some day be automatically handled by a computer, in which case the judgement will be completely impartial. Initially they could be trained in parallel to real judges to see if the judgements more or less match and to detect errors.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  You don't want "impartial" judgements this is how martial law works, the legal system has to take circumstances into account unless you want to the days where we used to send people to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. You can't teach computers empathy and empathy is part of our legal system for better or for worse.
  - jnbiche 10y ago
    > empathy is part of our legal system I don't see evidence of much empathy in the US justice system.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      Brock Turner is a recent high-profile example of it (in a bad way), although that sort of thing may be uncommon.
    - at-fates-hands 10y ago
      Have you ever had to deal with the system on any level?
      - jnbiche 10y ago
        Yes, have you?
        at-fates-hands 10y ago
        Yeap. My experiences have been pretty positive in that I was able to avoid jail time or anything going on my record that I would have to explain to a potential employer. For the minor stuff I've been to court on that I handled myself, I've always gone in a suit and tie and been very respectful to the DA. Both times, he basically put me on probation and then told me to get out of his court. The other times I've been to court and required an attorney, I took the financial hit in order to avoid having to go through the system. Again, every time I was able to get out unscathed. I had decent attorneys that were able to make deals with the DA's for reduced sentencing, longer probation, etc. Everything was usually done before I actually had to appear in court. So shy of being incarcerated and having to go through the system (arrest, posting bail, court appearance, and having to serve jail time) I've had fairly positive experiences. You?
    - Larrikin 10y ago
      The color of your skin still plays a major role in determining the amount of empathy you'll get
  - dmix 10y ago
    > unless you want to the days where we used to send people to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. I found out this actually happens recently (if you have a record in Canada). A recent client of my lawyer partner had a past record ( domestic abuse and one more minor crime) and went to prison for stealing about $15-20 of food because he was hungry. Regardless I know what you're saying. But there may still be the potential for a computer in the future which can analyze the context of the past thousands and thousands of human judge cases with machine learning algorithms. So it's not just a literal interpretation of law. The challenge is establishing parameters such as previous record, age, grievousness of crime, etc. The goal is to provide a balance to human emotion. Maybe the solution here is providing that to judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys through technology.
  - laurent123456 10y ago
    That's why I wrote "simple cases" and circumstances could be taken into account as long as the software has access to the person's criminal record, family situation, job, etc. Empathy in the end comes from knowing about the person's background and, assuming it's possible to provide this information to a software program, it could make a decision as good, and maybe better, than a judge (if anything, that will allow the judge to spend time on more complicated cases). Also it's well known that, for instance, less attractive people get harsher sentences, and machines will be completely immune to this kind of bias.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      We can't get a machine to recommend a movie accurately atm you want it to case judgement? And there are solutions for less attractive people getting harsher sentences, I think the jury sitting with their backs to the courtroom isn't a bad idea, or not even being in the same room at all.
      - laurent123456 10y ago
        A human also cannot accurately recommend a movie, which means it's not as trivial a task as it seems. Anyway, an algorithm judgement should not be blindly trusted, and there should be plenty of checks to make sure someone doesn't accidentally get NaN years of detention, but it could have its use.
  - Veedrac 10y ago
    > You don't want "impartial" judgements Why? Your argument seems to be that without empathy in the legal system people would go to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. That doesn't really make sense, My argument would be that with empathy in the legal system, unlikeable people from the wrong minority with an unhappy judge would go to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. There is so much disproportionality in the legal system that has arisen from gut feelings and a lack of objectivity - not just obvious things like racism but even just some crimes having far harsher punishments than more damaging ones because they're easier to get angry about. Formalizing things like reduced punishments for crimes with lower damage (aka. bread is cheap) or born of necessity (aka. the thief can't afford food) seems so trivial a concern in comparison. Obviously formalizing more complex issues is also hard, but the bar to beat isn't set particularly high.
    - hackuser 10y ago
      I agree there are many problems with injecting human judgment, but also many benefits. It's not all or nothing. We don't want to simply replace one set of problems with another.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      How would you formalize it without it being exploitable? And what about other things, how about a father who killed the man who raped his daughter? Or a woman who hired some one to kill her abusive partner? How would you estimate damage? it's easy to do with itemised goods but how do you estimate the damage of being abused, raped, how do you put a value on someone's life? These are things we haven't even managed to fully grasp and defined yet, and you want us to define that to a computer? How are you going to form a legal argument that can lead to a new precedent to a computer?
      - mangeletti 10y ago
        Certainly not with Ethereum :) Of course what I just said is kind of comical at first glance, but in all honesty, and to absolutely agree with and add to your point, the exploits related to Ethereum are great examples of how something seemingly infallible that is set in stone can easily turn out to be an Achilles' heel, which then, just like in the case of Ethereum, requires human intervention, bringing it back full circle. Also, to add to this, as @hackuser mentions[1], the system, even if set perfectly in stone, will still be based on somebody's biases. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12462653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12462653
  - pc86 10y ago
    I'm pretty opposed to having computers issuing legal judgments for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that I spend a pretty large part of my day surrounded by government-written and government-sponsored software. But if we were going to go that route eventually, perhaps a system where a judge is provided the "impartial" judgment as additional information or where the decisions are reviewed by a judge before sentencing and could be lessened/cancelled but not increased?
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      We could have a different definition of "impartial", there is a difference between a judge being impartial by not allowing outside interference which is not related to the direct matter and subject of the case from influencing their judgement. However we do take account for both the letter and the spirit of the law when making a judgment, and we take account of the circumstances and the nature of the crime, the offenders and the offended parties. We also make arguments based on the spirit of the law that do appeal to our human nature and empathy at large and this is a very important part of our legal system. You would not want to see a judicial system where this isn't possible, you see this usually under martial law and other authoritative regimes were all crimes and all offenders are equal to the law and receive the same and often harsh punishment. Even tho in the US the execution of the legal system might not be perfect, or quite far from it depending on how you look at it the principles of it are pretty important, if was pretty much the first legal system where we said we will not throw people to jail for being in debt, it was one of the few legal systems that did hold itself to higher standards of justice and equality. And you can't have that with computers, not only because you can't teach them those things but because a legal system isn't some static list, it isn't the 10 commandments. Our legal system is a living and breeding organism and judges, arbiters and lawyers are it's organs without them debating and arguing the legal system would "die". You won't have new arguments, you won't have new precedents for the most part the entire legal system would grind to a halt and the only thing you'll have remaining is a penal code. And trust me you do not want to live under a legal system which is in a effect a static and impartial penal code.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      > But if we were going to go that route eventually, perhaps a system where a judge is provided the "impartial" judgment as additional information or where the decisions are reviewed by a judge before sentencing and could be lessened/cancelled but not increased? That is basically what we do in the federal system. Judges have to calculate sentences using a mechanical, point-based system called the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. The judge has discretion to depart from the calculated sentence, but in practice the guideline sentence has a powerful anchoring effect. And it's terrible. Turns out that its much easier to formulate a system with inhumanely long sentences when you're a committee developing an abstract point-scoring system than when you're an individual judge faced with deciding the fate of a living, breathing human in front of you.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    What do you mean "used to".
- hackuser 10y ago
  > judgement will be completely impartial It would be just as partial, but instead of the judge's biases it would reflect the preferences of other humans, the software developers and whoever controls them. I think there's a great risk in misrepresenting to the public that computers are somehow impartial, and not representative and under the control of human interests. It's like saying a legal contract is impartial.
dogma1138 10y ago
Having a panel of judges that is "isolated" from each other outside of the courtroom can help reduce the likelihood of these things happening. Having attentive clerks as well as maybe mandatory psychiatric counseling for judges can also resolve some issues.
- pc86 10y ago
  I'm not sure what good psychiatric counseling would do? "Oh you had a fight with your spouse last night? You better take a day or two off."
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Alleviate the psychological pressure that comes from being a judge. Provide an evaluation as to their ability to preside over a case. You can think of plenty of other examples where therapy and counseling might be quite good, i rather not have judges secretly medicating themselves with antidepressants, and judging by statistics alone probably more than a handful of them do.
- corecoder 10y ago
  What about running these statistics (correlating decisions with day of week, hour of day, etc.) for each judge, and then just tell them: see, in the past year you acted in this not very bright way; maybe you should think about the way you do your job? And, by the way, we'll keep running these statistics on how you judge. Being made aware of our own biases is often the most effective way to make the situation better.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Could be but statistics are tricky. Hour of day / day of week can easily be skewed by the system at large. For example more bar fights over the weekends, more violent crime during the heat waves in the summer, more prank crimes involving young first time offenders during school breaks (e.g. spring break), more cases of spousal abuse during the holiday season etc. Just having the numbers and saying here you are biased isn't really easy because it might not be possible to actually determine true bias from them.
brianlweiner 10y ago
Indeed other research has indicated that lots of factors can affect a judge's decisions. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full A panel of judges would be one approach. Perhaps judges could be made aware of what the average penalty is for similar cases and that would give them an easier anchor for their decision.
- hobbyjogger 10y ago
  The Danziger study assumed that the order in which the parolees appeared was random, which turned out not to be the case: "Danziger et al. (1) concluded that meal breaks taken by Israeli parole boards influence the boards’ decisions. This conclusion depends on the order of cases being random or at least exogenous to the timing of meal breaks. . . [But] case ordering is not random ...the board tries to complete all cases from one prison before it takes a break and to start with another prison after the break. Within each session, unrepresented prisoners usually go last and are less likely to be granted parole than prisoners with attorneys... [O]ur data indicate a success rate of 67% for prisoners with counsel and 39% for unrepresented prisoners. Excluding deferrals in the authors' data yields very similar success rates, beginning at about 75% and dropping to 42% at the end of a session. Thus, we strongly suspect that the pattern of declining success rates is a result of hearing represented prisoners first and unrepresented prisoners last." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198355/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198355/
  - kahirsch 10y ago
    Note that there is a reply to that letter: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198336/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198336/
- mattkrause 10y ago
  That paper has some serious issues. On the practical side, the prisoners were ordered. Judges tried to break for meals after processing a whole 'batch' of prisoners from a specific prison. Within a prison block, those with lawyers went before those representing themselves, and lawyers also ordered their cases however they wanted. As you might expect, prisoners having counsel fared better than those without. Additionally, they measured "time elapsed from a meal" in two ways: actual wall time (in hours/minutes/seconds/etc), and case order. Both measures were individually significant, but when both were put into a model, only the ordinal one remained significant. This suggests--to me, at least--that the result isn't due to a physiological process: blood sugar levels vary continuously and don't "jump" from case to case. There was a rebuttal letter in PNAS shortly after it was published. Edit: HobbyJogger covered most of this first. Thanks!
metaphorm 10y ago
sentencing by tribunal. maybe one person could be in a bad mood, but all 3 at the same time?
- lostlogin 10y ago
  When someone at work is in a foul mood, it creates tension and problems that drag everyone down.
lukeschlather 10y ago
The solution is restorative justice, where the focus is on repairing the harm rather than punishment. For example, sending a drug addict to prison for 10 years doesn't do anything to alleviate the harm of the crime, and in fact is harmful in and of itself, just in a different way. The law needs to maintain a much closer balance between hurting people and helping people. While hurting criminals does have a deterrent factor, we do have to make sure that after we hurt them we build them back up so they don't reoffend. In the long run, skipping the "build them back up" step is more dangerous than skipping the punishment step. Our laws currently falsely assume that skipping the punishment step is the most dangerous thing to do.
- koolba 10y ago
  > The solution is restorative justice, where the focus is on repairing the harm rather than punishment. What's the repair/punishment for me smoking a joint on my front porch?
  - zo1 10y ago
    Repair is only applicable when there is victim. The other point is that certain acts can not be meaningfully repaired/repaid within our current societal context. I.e. How do you measure the repayment or actions-required to repair a life that is taken by someone? I would argue indentured servitude is a valid way to go, but it makes people uncomfortable because they see it as slavery. Yet, keeping someone locked up in an unproductive cage, to watch them wither away is somehow "rehabilitating" them. It's not, it's punishing them, it's revenge.
    - cloverich 10y ago
      > Yet, keeping someone locked up in an unproductive cage, to watch them wither away is somehow "rehabilitating" them. I don't think most people claim its rehabilitation. I think the "rehabilitation" angle is political word play and would bet that most people who support harsh prison sentences see it (and support it) as punishment.
VikingCoder 10y ago
Well, one thing we have to do for sure is inject tests into the system. Hire actors to play defense, prosecution, etc, without the judge knowing. Change one variable, and see how different judges react. Black, white, male, female, handicapped, etc. Witnesses, victims, defendant. At a minimum, publish scores of Judges, so the public can make informed decisions. Justice has to be blind, or there's no fucking point.
kafkaesq 10y ago
Getting rid of: mandatory minimums; three-strikes-your-out laws; the drug war generally, the for-profit prison industrial complex generally, and as other have stated, the whole concept of retributive justice generally might go a long way towards those ends.
funkymike 10y ago
It doesn't even take a specific event. Don't go in front of a judge just before lunch as their hunger can influence their decisions, likely not in your favor. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110411/full/news.2011.227.html http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110411/full/news.2011.227.ht...

anexprogrammer 10y ago

Given there's research showing harshness increases over time until lunch then dropping markedly, then increasing again over the afternoon this isn't terribly surprising. We're not likely to eliminate these factors any time soon.

hackuser 10y ago
> We're not likely to eliminate these factors any time soon. I disagree. Knowing about them can make a big difference, and training can teach people to avoid these errors.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  We can mitigate them to some extent with awareness and training. With research seeming to show subconscious biases remarkably difficult to remove, I sincerely doubt they can be eliminated. We haven't managed it in society and the workplace despite significant legislative effort.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > I sincerely doubt they can be eliminated. We haven't managed it in society and the workplace despite significant legislative effort. Right. Who made the standard (for anything!) 100% success? But society and the workplace have greatly improved, through social effort and also the resulting legislative one. Just 60 years ago, women were only allowed to be teachers and nurses; not long before that, they needed their husband's permission to get a job and were locked out of higher education for the most part. Now most college graduates are women and most law school graduates are women. 65 years ago the U.S. had segregation! Now a black man is President, the black middle-class has exploded, etc. Look also at attitudes toward race, sexual orientation, religion - look at surveys from the 50s and 60s (and later). In fact, I think the pessimism in the above comment is completely backward. The track record is of amazing revolutions in human affairs.
    - anexprogrammer 10y ago

kldaace 10y ago

I'm going to wait for more replication before I adjust my priors too much on this. It seems plausible prima facie, but I'm suspicious of their methodology. From the article (I don't have access to the working paper), it sounds like they might have been trying to test the significance of a lot of different variables, and this might just be the one that popped up.

maxerickson 10y ago
If you have "priors" that you can adjust, that suggests you think you are an explicit Bayesian reasoner. It's incoherent to take on that identity and then ignore new information. You should just conjure probabilities from this incident that will have an acceptably low impact on your priors.
- kldaace 10y ago
  I'm not ignoring new information, I'm just saying my priors are strong enough and the evidence is weak enough that this won't make me change my beliefs "too much."

nxzero 10y ago

Once had the very surreal experience while in court waiting to litigate a case to object to a higher court's jurisdiction over a case; my motion was granted, and the case was sent to the lower court. While waiting for the above motion to be heard for over an hour, the person directly behind me was calling how the judge would respond to various matters that required the judge's opinion. Having nothing to do, since mobile device weren't allowed, I listened to the predictions made and the outcome. The predictions were wrong most of the time. As I stated earlier, my motion to send the complaint back to the lower court was granted and it turns out that the person behind me was the judge for the lower court. Yes, the lower court was predictably unable to predict the higher court's judgements the majority of the time. To me, this if it holds true statistically across the legal system in a blind test of judges -- it is a major issue; normally, judges don't want to publicly rule against another judge unless it's obvious the other judge was wrong. Strange end to my experience was that I won in the lower court and the other party failed to appeal the judgement in a timely manner; meaning my motion to dismiss the appeal was granted based on it being filed one day late by the opposing party by the higher court. Always wondered what would have happened if the higher court had heard the case and issued a judgement; lucky that never happened.

acbabis 10y ago
I was under the impression that you only have multiple courts review a case when the case is appealed. Wouldn't cases that are appealed be biased in favor of unpredictability by the fact that people believed they could be reversed?
- nxzero 10y ago
  Happy to address the question, but it's not clear to me exactly what the question is. In the example I provided the lower court and court above it shared jurisdiction over the case by law. Generally, upper courts for case load reasons will not hear a case that's not an appeal. In this case, the higher court considered hearing the case based on the arguments of the other party, but I won based on my arguments that as a result of the contract between the parties the lower court was explicitly the only court that had jurisdiction over the matter. For what it's worth, I'm not an attorney, just skilled at legal matters and litigation; as an example, once had a judge issue an order by phone for me and have their clerk draft the order too - ask any attorney if they've ever done that... :-)

romanovcode 10y ago

It's also proven that judges make harsher sentences just before the lunchtime. (Because they're hungry)

ttkeil 10y ago
Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full
dmoy 10y ago
Parole board also less likely to grant parole right before lunch.
hiddenkrypt 10y ago
The study that suggested (not proven) that was found to have some flaws: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463053

deviate_X 10y ago

Human's are rarely rational in a way that could be understood to be accepted as absolute, we are overwhelmingly emotional creatures just like every other creature in existence. So if a young person displeases you, then all such young people will be simply marked as a threat +1 by your brain

finid 10y ago

> That may be acceptable as long as it’s one tool in many, he said, but data shouldn’t drive the entire justice system. Data has always driven all the decisions we make. It's just that in the past, before big data, our personal computers (read: brains) did the data wrangling. By the way, we still do it. It's how humans and other living things employ profiling.

Terr_ 10y ago
"The checks and balances of democratic governments were invented because humans themselves realized how unfit they were to govern themselves. They needed a system, yes. An industrial age machine."

Broken_Hippo 10y ago

I generally think a focus on restoring the person to a good citizen is a bonus: There is no point in putting someone with an anger problem in prison if you aren't going to take care of the anger problem while they are there just like it isn't likely that a prison sentence is going to help much if your main problem is that you were nearly starving or addicted to drugs. Nonetheless, I do believe this is where education, information, and standards should come into play. We should expect training so that judges can overcome things like the result of emotions on sentencing. We should have recommendations of standards for sentencing, and public feedback on how the judge tends to lean. With numbers, a particilar judge can know they are more harsh after lunch, more lenient on women, and other such things. They can look to see what the average sentence range is for the basic situation (x-y for first offense: y-z for second, etc). Some folks have mentioned a computer system, and I don't think this is all that bad of an idea if used wisely. More like information and suggested sentencing: First offense? Age? Family? Extenuating circumstances that might require leniency or harshness? and then get a range of recommendations with their effectiveness rates. I do think it is prudent to have sentences seconded by a separate judge, especially if the judge is towards or over the harsher end of the punishments or too far into the leniency. I do think they might get rubber-stamped if not done correctly, but I also think this would get judges to consider outcomes.

888uuii 10y ago

None of this is going to get any easier until widespread recognition of the next objective of humanity as permanently ending human killing and torture gains universal or universally-implementable acceptance.

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