The above-titled article posted on the GovTech website discussed some recent research of interest to courts.
“Researchers created an algorithm that predicts risks of biased, overly punitive sentencing. The tool performs with similar accuracy — and similar limits — to risk assessment algorithms already used to influence pretrial and parole decisions, authors say.
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A new algorithm aims to assess the likelihood of defendants being treated unfairly in court.
The tool considers details that ought to be immaterial to the ruling — such as the judge’s and defendant’s gender and race — and then predicts how likely the judge is to award an unusually long sentence. This can suggest when socio-demographic details may be swaying judgments, resulting in especially punitive treatments.
Members of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Idaho Justice Project and University of Pennsylvania created the algorithm for U.S. district court cases. They presented it in a report during the June Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (ACM FAccT).
“The risk assessment instrument we develop in this paper aims to predict disproportionately harsh sentences prior to sentencing with the goal of hopefully avoiding these disproportionate sentences and reducing the disparities in the system going forward,” the authors state in their report.”
Click here for the full GovTech article.
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