Slashdot Mirror
Data Entry Errors Resulted In Improper Sentences
shrik writes "Slate has a look at the efforts of Emily Owens, in 2005 a Ph.D student in economics at the University of Maryland, who 'came across thousands of inconsistencies and errors in the sentencing recommendations provided to judges' by the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy. Quoting: 'The sentencing guidelines for judges were based on a work-sheet [PDF] that "graded the severity of a convict's crime and his risk to society", ostensibly to make the rulings meted out more objective in nature. But on carefully studying her data, Owens noticed something wasn't adding up — the system seemed to be producing 1 error in every ten trials. She also realized that this "recommendation system" actually mattered: crimes and criminals analyzed to be quite similar were resulting in systematically different punishments correlated with the work-sheet.' The source of these discrepancies was ultimately found to be a simple, but very significant, PEBKAC: 'More than 90 percent of errors resulted from the person completing the work sheet [usually the DA, but signed off by the defense attorney] entering the figure from a cell next to the correct one. ... The remaining errors came mostly from incorrect choice of criminal statute in calculating the offense score and from a handful of math errors (in operations that were literally as simple as adding two plus two).' Timo Elliott's BI Questions Blog lists the morals of the story."
That one in ten cases is incorrectly sentenced by this system says to me that some of the attorneys are filling these forms out; When the clerks take care of it, they usually get it right.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
This is another example of why impartial and fair justice is really only available to the rich. A rich defendant could afford to pay his high powered defense attorney team to scrutinize this level of detail. This is not happening for poor defendants who are forced to settle for noble, but overworked, public defenders.
A good lawyer is expensive, some criminals can't afford good ones. Instead they end up with overworked public defenders who might have read the case file before going into the court.
How many lawyers are modding today? Whoever is modding this down is in denial. I've worked for a law school, a law firm, and independent lawyer, and a state bar association, and I can vouch that the parent is absolutely correct. Lawyers are good at arguments, not book keeping.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
They get to charge $300+ an hour to sit there and explain things to you. Damn straight they're "more than happy" to do it!