Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Can Technology Improve the Judicial System?
An anonymous reader writes One of the cornerstones of any democracy is its judicial system. Fortunately, most of us never have to deal with it. On the other hand, the fact that we so seldom interact with it also means that most of us are not constantly thinking about it. It is possible our judicial system would be much better if most of us had to spend more time thinking about it. I myself had not put much thought into it until I watched a documentary about Aaron Swartz. It is frightening to think that someone could have been left in a position like that. I also hear about so many cases were people end up pleading guilty because they do not have enough money to fight a case in court. Is this really the best we can do? The Marshal Project is also an interesting source of information regarding the shortfalls of our current system.
What do you think about it? How can we improve our judicial system? Is there any interesting way that technology could be used to improve the system?
What do you think about it? How can we improve our judicial system? Is there any interesting way that technology could be used to improve the system?
It is a question of vested interests and poor incentives. Elected judges and elected prosecutors - how can you not end up with poor decisions? Poorly thought through kneejerk laws, like asset forfeiture and three strike life sentences - how can you have justice with a system like this?
[FUCK BETA]
What a load of crap. In Canada we have a healthcare "system", I can go to a hospital without mortgaging my house.
We DO NOT have a judicial system. We have a LEGAL MARKET.
You BUY whatever "legal" you need. Can't afford it? Tough.
So much for your democracy.
You want to use technology? OUTSOURCE your precious justice just like MY ENGINEERING JOBS have been.
Then we'll see how talks about "cornerstones" and "systems".
Fucking asshole.
Promis:
-kgj
The system is working just as the system wants to work. If you have money, it is kind to you. If you do not have money, it will grind you down and hopefully in the process transfer what little money you do have to the system.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Robotic judges and robotic lawyers. Just what we need...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
the delusion that you can get justice against the State when the STATE owns the court is fucking ludicrous.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Robots could dole out life sentences to the darker skinned accused without looking like they didnt check their white privilege.
Technology probably isn't the key. But here is what I'd like to see...
1. A constitutional right to privacy from arrest to conviction for those who choose such. That way good names don't get tainted. (Just look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_Solo#Arrest )
2. An effort to make it more about reform than punishing people.
3. Eliminate mandatory sentencing. Rename it as "suggested". I think one issue is granting smaller sentences to people you "favor", hence why mandatory sentencing perhaps was created?
4. Start paying those who serve on juries (actually in the courtroom) minimum wage. (Or is this would be a financial disaster, only on days 3+.)
5. We talk about requiring coding in schools. How about requiring something that might make a difference? A law course. Nothing big, but just to get people familiar with it as much as a 90 credit hour class would cover.
6. The six-month thing required for jury trials in so many places should be scrapped. Allow a jury trial for any length of potential incarceration. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juries_in_the_United_States#Scope_of_constitutional_right
it's the only option.
Whose metric? Does improvement mean fewer false convictions or more convictions? Does improvement mean conviction rates remain the same but everyone gets a lollipop?
The problem with a 24/7 panopticon is the lack of democratic ownership of the data. Google Glass was a fantastic missed opportunity to put the power of video recording on demand in the hands of every person. There will be future opportunities though.
With 24/7 recording of every event, human action, dialogue, and conversation: the problem of finding justice is a question of the sum of all evidence available outweighing the competing evidence to the benefit of the righteous party. When everyone is guilt, backroom negotiations where the weight of the evidence is haggled over decide the outcome of the case before any embarrassment is necessary as a matter of public record. The past 6 years of my life are meticulously documented as a result of never deleting anything and living through my PC. When a question of facts arises, I can locate and quote the records verbatim as required to support my position, or at least bring clarity to the issue.
With the benefit of 24/7 video recording: there is no hearsay. The most damning video compilation showing contemptible behavior tips the case in the favor of the morally righteous, or at least: legally savy.
The judicial system is, at heart, a method of resolving disputes. Sometimes those are disputes between civilians (civil suits) and sometimes they are criminal cases, disputes between people and the state.
The most obvious and easy place to start is with small claims courts. Commercial arbitration handles many disputes that would otherwise end up in small claims courts, but we don't exploit this anywhere near enough. Most people just rely on their bank to act as a dispute mediator via the credit card chargeback mechanism, but this is a one-size-fits-all solution and banks are often not good at mediating disputes. There's lots of fraud and problematic outcomes.
The place where most of the better-law-through-tech research is happening right now is the Bitcoin community, because of the general focus on decentralisation, global trade and frequent desire to avoid relying on government. So we have for example BitRated which is a platform for doing dispute mediated Bitcoin transactions, where anyone can be the dispute mediator. So you can get a fluid, international market of specialised judges who are experts in very particular types of transactions, like software contracts etc where "I didn't get software of sufficient quality" is not a dispute that makes sense to handle via a chargeback. And it can all happen over the internet.
That's a very simple example. More complex examples involve specifying a contract in the form of a computer program and then effectively having the program be the "judge". I wrote about how to implement this, again with Bitcoin, several years ago. The technology is not that complicated actually. The hard part is figuring out the right user interfaces to make it easy. Presumably only very simple and precise contracts could be managed that way, so there's still open research in how to craft these digital contracts such that you can escape back to human judgement if there's an exceptional case.
When it comes to criminal rather than commercial cases, probably the best way to apply technology to reduce costs is to allow remote lawyering. That is, you should be able to outsource your legal representation to someone who isn't physically present. They may be rather good and experienced, but just lives out in rural areas or in a country where the cost of living is cheaper. The issue here is not really technical but rather just institutional inertia.
The UK is putting its judicial system under tremendous financial pressure at the moment, to the extent that some criminal cases are just being abandoned because there's insufficient money to run them. They're (finally!) starting to experiment with allowing small claims court cases to be resolved over the phone, and also looking at decriminalising TV license violations to reduce pressure on the system. But you get the idea - the judicial system innovates extremely slowly even when being sliced to the bone. So don't hold your breath.
guilt = ( rand() & 1 ) ? "Yes" : "No";
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The problem with the Judicial system is partly a reflection of it's fundamental design, and partly a reflection of current American culture.
Take the design issue. We have an adversarial system rather then an Inquisitorial system. This means that your defense is up to you, the government's sole job is to convict you, and the Judge's only job is to call balls and strikes. Which means that if you're poor in America, and you don't have a lawyer who can go over every single piece of evidence with a fine-tooth comb for Fourth Amendment violations, then de facto you don't have Fourth Amendment rights. The Judge is not allowed to force your lawyer to triple-check that the cops didn't fudge the info they put on a warrant application, your public defender probably only has 8 hours to deal with your entire case, so you're fucked. In France and some other countries the Judge is allowed a more active role, but to do that you have to give him more active role in the investigation, at which point the system becomes an Inquisitorial system. And in the US we're reflexively Protestant, so we insist on remembering the Evils of the Spanish Inquisition (just as Queen Elizabeth I intended) and that's a non-starter.
Note that this means that the only way a Judge has to convict somebody with really food rules lawyers in the US is think his way around Constitutional rights in ways rules lawyers can't counter (for example, the "good faith exception" to the Fourth Amendment says the cop had to know that he was violating the Fourth Amendment to get evidence thrown out) or nobody who makes more then $80k would ever be convicted. The muddle class thinks it always looks innocent, so $80k guy can can easily beat probable cause. But then there's a precedent the guy making $20k can't afford to reason around.
And there's the ridiculous amounts of money we pay people with PhD-level degrees in lucrative fields, and a legal degree (or a Juris Doctorate) is one of those degrees. you make it virtually impossible to give every defendant a lawyer who has a week to devote to his case. The money to pay the lawyers does not exist, the lawyers themselves do not exist, etc.
The "looks innocent" thing is huge. In NYC until De Blasio took office it was routine for cops to stop every young black man in the city once a year on the basis he was pretty sure said young black man had a gun in his pocket and was going to pull it out and start a murder spree. The warrantless search almost never turned up a weapon, does not seem to have ever prevented a murder spree, and was entirely justified by legal paperwork the cop filed when he was back at the station. It resulted in black men into weed losing most Federal financial aid (because they were convicted of drug crimes), including student loans, and thus being ineligible for most colleges. And yet when a Judge ruled that shit violated the Fourth Amendments fairly explicit right to be secure about one's person, she got reprimanded by the Appeals Court.
The basic fact is the Founders took a system that was literally designed solely to protect the Nobility from commoners (in English Law, for example, "Peer" is the word for "nobleman", so a "Jury of your Peers" means a Jury made up of nobleman of your own rank) back in the UK, added some Amendments so their new King-stand-in couldn't use said system to prevent himself from being voted out of office, and called it a day. If you want it to be fairer to people who don't have $250k lawyer budgets you'll need to make good legal help cheap, which probably won't happen unless you change the job market so that people with $250k legal budgets are much rarer. The $250k will get them a very convincing actor with legal skills for the jury trial, and it will get them people with mediocre acting skills to go over the paperwork of the investigation in very close detail and determine what can be excluded, which Juror is most likely to vote innocent, etc. while still having $15k to pay for expert testimony.
In my rural county, some jurors must travel 100 miles each way to Superior Court. Jury quality suffers because so many potential jurors wash out on the economic burden questions, shrinking the pool to a small core of the nearby retired. Allowing jurors to remote in would be a real help. This doesn't have to mean attending from home; if control of the juror's environment becomes a problem, have remote jury rooms at branch libraries and police stations.
The problem is that federal prosecutors are appointed by the executive branch (DOJ, but the under the president) and are selected for, and instructed to pursue the political agenda of their superiors. Each prosecutor also has their own political agenda. The prosecutor that went after Swartz (Carmen Ortiez) has a reputation for this sort of thing. The best way to fix the system would be coming up with some non-partisan method to select/appoint/elect the prosecutors and perhaps even the attorney general. The way things are right now the president is nearly immune from any legal oversight, but can bring the full wrath of the USDOJ upon his/her enemies. I don't claim to have a solution, but perhaps if we moved DOJ under the control of the SCOTUS things might improve somewhat.
what about tech jurors that know stuff about IT for some court cases.
Common Law is just not a very good system. It had its time and place, but Civil Law is much better. The outcome of a trial is more predictable, there is better separation of powers and the whole system just makes much more sense.
and even then it should be used to augment the evidence at hand, not supplant it.
...I'd like to see technology deliver a true veil of ignorance between juries and prosecutor/defendant/court.
It would be the job of prosecutor, defendant (under the eye of the judge) to present a basic outline of events with neuter models in a visualized space. Witnesses could be questioned and cross examined in real time, but with the judge having a time delay circuit allowing the to excise any non relevant information to the case...defendant would not be a white man or black woman, just "defendant", etc.
-Styopa
You might end up with a Baby Cooper Dollar Bill.
Need to be nuked
-no sig today-
Technology can only make you aware of the law, rules of evidence and relevant precedents and possibly coming up with some convincing illustrations / presentations / simulations to aid your case. It can't fix the letter of the law or how the legal process works, particular not where you're dealing with statutory damages, mandatory sentencing guidelines and so on, it can't help you get expert witnesses, it can't cross-examine witnesses, honestly the legal process is mostly a person-to-person thing. In the legal system, tech doesn't do you much good. Unless you're talking about using tech to evade the legal system, but I assume that's an entirely different question.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is much to be done, but a great place to start would be moving to an independent system of true forensics science. In our current system, the forensics people work for the prosecution. They are not blinded as to what the police and prosecutor think about the crime or potential perpetrators. Much of what passes for "science" in the courtroom has absolutely no scientific basis, despite their "Frye Standard" of evaluating scientific evidence. There is very little research into the accuracy of forensics conclusions.
Radley Balko over at the Washington Post just published a 4 part series on the flawed science of bite mark analysis. Our system is so increadibly screwed up that even getting caught on video tape framing an innocent man using junk "science" that has been discredited by actual scientific research isn't enough to get the courts and prosecutors to consider the possibility that they might have an innocent man in jail. The series is well worth the read, and if you really want to get your blood pressure up, follow the links to individual cases down a rathole of righteous indignation.
In Mexico, where I live, notwithstanding the judiciary system is bad, there have been some recent technological improvements:
1) Since some years ago you can check for judiciary notifications regarding a case online. It works all of the time in federal level courts and sometimes in state level courts. You can also receive the writ of sentencing online for non penal cases.
2) At the federal level you can request a free cryptographic certificate (as a citizen or lawyer) and use that to communicate electronically with the courts and file certain types of procedures (such as requesting constitutional protection or challenging the constitutionality of a law ['trial of Amparo']).
3) In many states you can file reports to the police or the prosecutor online, and they assign a case number and follow through as if it was filed personally.
Also, in Mexican law the right of sharing cultural and intellectual property with others is more important than the right of profiting from it. So you can legally (as long as there is no profit involved) share, copy, and download any kind of copyrighted work, it is a right specifically enshrined by the law, and specially to educational works, which can be copied freely and without restriction.
Just work on fixing the system.
Not just jurors; for anything short of a felony, let the victim, er, I mean defendant, remote in too.
A lot of people, especially poorer and with more time-demanding jobs (think retail, fast food, etc. compared to office jobs where in many it's no big deal if you're gone half a day if you make up the time) or less ability to travel (gas is cheaper now, but not free, or many may not have a car and in most of the US public transit is lousy) just can't fight even basic traffic tickets and have to pay the fine and increased insurance costs. They can't wait around for the entire day to be called at 4:59pm.If they could attend remotely (wouldn't even need to be from their computer; friend or library or pay-for-use station at FedEx may work too) that would make it easier to attend.
Of course, making it easier to fight them would make it more likely that the state would lose, and so they'd never go for it. But it might get a trial in more adventurous/advanced locations such as New Hampshire.
... don't get caught.
Because I've never heard the phrase "death panel" uttered by anyone having an IQ above room temperature or Sarah Palin, the originator of that myth.
Catchy phrases are no substitute for knowledge and thoughtfulness.
They charge you with murder and having a gun, life or 1 year ,this is extortion.
It's funny that the summary starts with "One of the cornerstones of any democracy is its judicial system". That's true of all forms of society/government; it is absolutely not limited to democracies. So why bring democracy into it - except that it's one of the holy words of our society, a word that stuns everyone into instant acquiescence and worship?
One can make a strong case that justice is particularly hard to come by in a democracy, as opposed to a monarchy or a true aristocracy. The distinguishing feature of real democracy is that the people as a whole wield supreme power. So a majority can carry out any act, no matter how illogical, unethical, or downright disgraceful. Such as the execution of Socrates, for instance. Or the decision to execute the admirals of the Athenian fleet after the battle of Arginusae - which was rescinded the following day, when the people changed their minds.
You can see a similar pattern in the USA, where many prosecutors are elected by the people. This leads them to pursue popularity at all costs - and, in a populous society where most electors will never get to meet the actual candidate, popularity is usually sought by lighting up the media with sensational news. How many miscarriages of justice have been perpetrated because a prosecutor wanted to make a name for himself? And of course the prosecutor is not held responsible, because his job is only to argue the case for conviction. If someone is wrongly found guilty, that is the fault of the defence, the jury, the judge, the police who made up evidence or concealed exonerating evidence... and anyway, it's all forgotten the next week.
Probably the best place to start constructing a good judicial system is with a genuine concern for justice. It has been well observed that, in any country that has a Ministry of Justice or something similar, justice itself will be conspicuous by its absence. (Just as any corporation that has an "ethics committee" has probably forgotten what the word "ethics" means). Honest people know what's right, but given enough bureaucracy and laws - assisted by thousands of career-minded functionaries - we get today's situation where any lawyer can tell you that the law has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with justice.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
...find out what the law is on a given subject. The current case-law system worked for a limited network of courts and practitioners (in England) who could refer to older cases for jurisprudence. Now, you have to pay thousands of dollars to have access to digital/searchable caselaw in a sprawling network of courts across a continent. In a democracy people should know what the law says.
Jury size and composition were defined using 18th century statistics. Voir dire - the jury selection process was intended to be a variation on cake cutting that removes bias but it is so stunningly gamed. Justice is now about how much money you have for the law firm. Law and crime are now a function of cash. The reason for this is that defense lawyers stunningly game the system. They reject anyone with a brain, anyone that isn't "vote innocent". That is not the same thing as justice - it is war, not truth.
Electronic means allow jury sizes that 1) account for bias so that - as George Carlin says it - "think of how dumb the average person is, now realize that half of all people are dumber than that" is not the measure of justice. Idiocracy no longer has to define the jury. In our hyper-surveillance culture the biases can be known and accounted for with a weight in the vote. 2) improve sample size. The size of the jury was a "necessary but sufficient" rule contrived when horse-drawn carriages were the norm and literacy was not. With larger sample sizes it is harder to "cherry pick" the few most likely to vote your way. In many places a measure of the sample statistic (taken from a subset) approaches the population statistic in the limit of "sufficient samples". This can make sure that there isn't a "hung jury" based on a limited outlier that the defense attorney was lucky enough to cherry pick. They can instead sample the actual opinion of the population given the prosecution and defense cases - the original intended function of current approach to justice.
I find it repugnant that our current system is fundamentally corrupt enough that a good lawyer can extort/blackmail egregious sums from criminals and prove them innocent when they are not. The idea of justice is so devastated that in the minds of lawyers it means "what can be proved" and no longer means "the truth about what was actually done". I would really like to see that resolved.
One of the big problems with the legal system is how inefficient and time consuming it is. We live in a world where just threatening legal action can put a big question mark over someone's financial future. To do anything, you need to pay for the services of expensive lawyers and paralegals. So this naturally puts the wealthy, big corporations and big government agencies at an advantage.
You can see how inefficient the judicial system is just by looking at how much paper they produce. They literally have to wheel boxes of documents into court with carts. Armies of paralegals have to manually sift through the documents by hand. It's really one of the most conservative and backwards industries out there.
The most obvious way that technology can help is by increasing efficiency and leveling the playing field. The ideas are not new (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/dp/01995...) and I think eventually law firms and courts will learn to leverage technology and make their services more accessible. Making information more accessible will also help shoot down abusers of the legal system (e.g. in invaliding bad patents - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/...).
Do you really want more efficiency? Even the simplest technology adoption would help immensely help that group of self-serving luddites. How about using email to mail copies of documents in advance of actual signed copies? How about using electronic records for managing cases? How about sharing information between jurisdictions? How about better surveillance equipment so we can simply have better evidence? WHOA.. wait.. maybe not some of those.. Hm.. maybe this is a slippery slope and you should be careful what you wish for.
----- obSig
It's too easy to end up in prison for doing nothing wrong. Americans hate freedom and want everything to be illegal.
I'm in my tenth year of practice in California handling general civil litigation. I can try to share a few key points that won't get me in trouble with my peers or area judges.
-- Every state should implement a PACER-like system where the public has remote access to all court records and can download all the PDFs they want for a small fee, 24/7. PACER/ECF is the Federal system for accessing and filing court documents, and it makes it really convenient when you can review an entire case file without physically going to the courthouse as you have to do in most state courts. The cost of implementing PACER with every state court system would be astronomical, but it would also provide astronomical benefits to the public. For one, the public (or more likely the legal section of the local news media) would be able to verify or refute bullshit public relations statements made by lawyers by reviewing the actual case filings.
-- Absent a full PACER/ECF implementation, every court system in a state should be linked to a centralized repository of searchable metadata instead of the current patchwork of incompatible systems for searching records. In California there are fifty-eight separate counties, each with its own Superior Court. This means each court has its own system for storing and accessing court records. Some aren't even searchable online; you have to go there in person. It makes it really difficult to conduct research on a particular case or client. Also, this is one reason why the private legal providers WestLaw and Lexis have services that I can't do without-- without a unified system, these private providers are the only way to sensibly aggregate and organize judicial opinions.
-- Lawyers should make better use of technology in their practices and lower their hourly rates as a result. I wrote my own calendaring software a few years ago that gave me a fully electronic calendar (until I started using Google calendar, which is a big improvement). I also run a paperless office with no permanent support staff and with a tiny physical office. This means I can make deals on my hourly rate with savvy clients so that we both win, and I can scale my practice appropriately so that I don't make big financial commitments and then not meet them. Some lawyers use electronic practice management software like Rocket Matter. Others find clients on Craigslist. Realistically, this type of technology interaction is one of the only ways to increase access to justice; currently, you have to make well over $100,000 per year to afford an actual lawyer, and even then it is a stretch for most people. Most hourly clients in civil litigation are actually businesses and companies, not individuals, because individuals don't have enough money to pay hourly. What I've observed though is that lawyers who have great technology keep their hourly rates the same and just pocket the extra money. And why shouldn't they?
-- Courts and older attorneys should get with the program in terms of new technology. Currently there is a lot of bureaucratic resistance as well as a generational gap in how lawyers and courts use technology. There are plenty of older attorneys out there who do not even have email, and there are many others who just don't care enough to learn MS Word. After all, if they can just hire support staff to do that, there is no incentive. As older lawyers retire or learn technology, this problem decreases for the profession, but courts are still way behind. There should be rules for judges requiring them to use technology.
-- State legislatures should spend more money on courts, but condition that funding on the use of industrial psychologists or other experts to help design better systems for information management. A local Superior Court that I practice in frequently and that I don't need to name still has physical documents hand-carried between its courthouses and administrative facilities. This is a huge waste of time, money, and effort when a few ScanSnap type machines and automated data p
1. Too many laws make for too many criminals. Repeal a LOT of laws. The exponentially increasing number of malum prohimitum laws has been eroding personal liberty since the 1910s.
2. Make congress do the legislating. No more, "as the secretary shall determine." That just means we have no law and we're ruled by unaccountable bureaucrats, and each president gets to appoint his cronies to exact his political agenda on his enemies. If congress isn't smart enough to write the law, then it shouldn't become a law.
3. Loser pays, in both civil and criminal trials. Yeah, I can bring a lawsuit against the US government for violating my rights, but they get to use their unlimited wealth on an army of DOJ lawyers to stall in the courts until I'm bankrupt. The fact that rights are only restored when groups like the ACLU, EFF and NRA get involved against the government is proof enough of the problem.
I used to work in the court - USA.
I will try be brief. The system is only as good as the people who work for the court. Simply said, they are HS graduates who have very little opportunity finding work anywhere else. After 10 or 15 years of working for the court they are now managers and HR professionals. Now those individuals end up hiring people who represent their views. The other "highly respected" individuals are HS graduates who got some college degree -- and now they are "authority" because the first group of people who hired them put them in charge. After years, and diploma mill created by those organizations with special trips to S.F. (I worked for California court.) and self patting circle jerk, created impermeable group think made through their committee style decisions. Who is in those committee? Dumb people with self aggrandizing education certificates and enormous power with very little oversight or accountability.
Since it is a committee, the lowest common denominator wins out. I will call it as it is. They are dumb, with confidence of thousands of Orcs, spurned by their that peer circle composed of other dumb people, they make decisions for millions of people in California. The smart and brilliant people who get hired in the IT, just sit quietly. And just say whether or not they can implement another short sighted and poorly implemented ideas arrived by the group.
I saw in few times with those who make those decisions. Because of politics, few smart ones, do not say anything. Everyone acts as they are managers, while no one knows what it takes to be a manager.
The oversight from AOC is farcical. Because they can only see what is presented to them. So everyone on the surface pretends to do well-- kind of like how people in N.Korea all know how to use the internet and have democracy.
There is nothing changing that culture. The sad part, the court is outsourcing most of the work it used to do the third parties. Those parties profit and increase the cost of operating the courts. That leads to more outsourcing and public suffers from higher costs, and less money going back to the court's budget.
Finally, what happens to those dumb people. They apply for higher level jobs within the court. In their resumes they can now say "Work as a manager at the court for 10 years" and did all the things they did. With no competition no accountability and results against which nothing is measured against, they make it to the very top of the chain.
Rinse and repeat. They in turn hire dumb people who resemble them, and on and on and on...
tl:dr
The change in the courts will be slow because how people get hired into the court, breeds inbreeding of dumb people. They are not bad people. They are just dumb. Dumb people have vision. Smart people stay quiet, because there are more dumb people who have more power.
The technology of distributed version control should be applied to legal text much like it is to code. A proposed law is pull request. An enacted law is an accepted pull request. Various jurisdictions can fork and merge laws.
And while we're at it, let's build domain specific languages for laws with with well defined syntax, in order to disambiguate law at least as much as politics will allow.
Catchy phrases are no substitute for knowledge and thoughtfulness.
Neither are ad hominems and ridicule.
The problem, put bluntly, is stupid judges. Judges are appointed by politicians who want reliable ideologues. Judges who will do what they are told. Smart people tend to think on their own. Result is 100% predicable.
You start by implying that it's NOT too complicated for the average person. You then state that criminal cases are decided by a jury and civil cases by a judge, which is incorrect on both points. Criminal cases are frequently heard by a judge only. In fact, the in the majority of criminal cases there is no jury - the judge solely makes the final decision after reviewing the plea agreement. Civil cases routinely include a jury.
So unfortunately it seems to be too complicated for you to grasp even the basics.
Go to reddit.com, and allow people to suggest punishments. The most upvoted punishment after 1 day becomes the punishment.
God spoke to me
Fortunately, we probably have one of the best judicial systems in the world, but unfortunately there are too many people that want to promote their career, and don't care about the results, except as to how it will promote their career.
My brother-in-law was a 2nd grade teacher. He had one girl that he touched on her shoulder when he was talking to her. She had been told by her mother that if anyone touched her when she didn't want them to, she should report it. Well, my brother-in-law was arrested for child abuse, supposedly for 8 counts. After the publicity that the case received, the prosecuting attorney finally looked at the evidence and realized that she didn't have a case. She didn't want to just drop the charges because it would clearly look bad for her, and that would possibly affect her re-election. So, she told him that his case would probably be a couple of years before it went to court (in other words, she would delay it going to trial), or, if he pled guilty to assault and battery, he could be released on probation for a year. So, he took the plea bargin. Now, he's served a year of probation, and has been assigned a new parole officer. They've extended his parole because they don't think that he's been social enough.
He also can't live at his residence, because his conviction was in one state and he lived in an adjacent state. When he was first home, the police came and told him he had to register as a sex offender if he was going to live there (his plea bargin was not to a sex crime). So he's kept an appartment in the adjacent state.
Although our judicial system is good, it could still be a lot better.
Now, I've aired some of my complaints of the criminal court system, but I'll stop there. As a physician, I definitely have more complaints regarding the civil court system. And ..., I could go on and on about the copyright and patent system.
The biggest problem with our judicial system is the cost. In any complex case the cost is out of reach for too many people. For example recently here in Oregon a soccer coach was charged with inappropriately touching a 12 year old girl on his team. After a year and a half the case was dismissed a week ago but he had run up legal bills of nearly $500,000. How many of us could afford something like that?
Standards for court documents, electronic filing processes, evidence, transcriptions, even laws and cases. The problem is that there is plenty of work to be had prosecuting cases, so there is no incentive to save money.
There is so much wrong, it is very difficult to believe that the system can be fixed at all.
That said, this:
First, they should have a "judges service" where a judge serves a randomly assigned trial with one requirement: it must be somewhere FAR from where they live. During their service, they are isolated, just as a jury would be sequestered. They would serve for the length of the trial, and we'd keep them in luxury, although 100% isolated from anything but the courtroom, a legal library, medical care, and food service. No television or Internet or radio, just movies on request (DVD, blueray.) This isolates them from bribery, bullshit trading of people's futures at the golf course, and other forms of influence peddling. Once served, they get paid time off equal to the length of the trial.
Second, we need to get rid of the laws that amount to the government attacking the people and/or corporate welfare. Broadcast station regulation, Drug laws, anti-sex-worker and client laws, seizure-without-warrant laws, and I think we should provide relief from laws like building codes where the prospective builder can show what they are doing is no threat to anyone else but the builder and any prospective buyer. There are an amazing number of building codes that amount to silly nothings for a farmer out on the plains, just for one of many possible examples. Reducing the bogus law overload would reduce the docket of the courts to a huge degree.
Third, plea bargaining has turned out to be an extremely bad thing. It should be abolished.
Fourth, piling on charges post-arrest should be abolished. You should have sufficient reason to arrest someone in the first place. You didn't do your due diligence beforehand, then you suck.
Fifth, this business of taking people's resources away from them before they've had their day in court essentially puts them in a can't-defend-themselves circumstance, and is unjust in the extreme anyway as it is pre-conviction-punishment.
Sixth, cops are just too bloody free with shooting people, pets and so on. I suggest we remove the option of lethal weaponry. How is a good question, but I'm sure we can come up with something. Tasers are part of the answer; some kind of glue gun might be another.
Seventh, the constitution needs some updating. To begin with, it needs some kind of teeth. Congresscritter dimwit writes up a law that infringes on your right to keep and carry, he's shown the door. Writes a law that amounts to the government censoring speech, shown the door. And so on. Still in this context, the 2nd is perfectly clear if you're not being outright disingenuous or ignorant, but it needs some exceptions -- nukes, bioweapons, chemical weapons obviously, but we might want to consider sonics and beam weapons before we get into another hairball over those when they arrive. The 4th *clearly* was written with the assumption that a warrant was *required* and for that reason, it spends most of its text describing what constitutes "reasonable." But again, the disingenuous and ignorant have said it means "if I think it's reasonable, we don't need a warrant." It needs to be re-written so that this kind of sophist fuckery isn't so easily pursued. The commerce clause also needs some work. The current government interpretation of it is like a kindergartner's explanation of atomic physics. If I grow a crop for my own consumption in my state, it's not interstate commerce. If I use a telephone to call my neighbor in the same state, it's not interstate commerce. And so on.
Eighth, ex post facto laws have to go. This business of adding to people's punishment after conviction is already explicitly forbidden to both the federal government and the state government. Once sentenced for X, people should serve at *most* that sentence for X. Less if the state thinks it has a good reason.
Ninth, and related to eighth, once a sentence is served, the records should be sealed from everyone but law enforcement. Otherwise we will continue to create a massively disadvantaged cl
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Frankly the judicial system is not completely designed to achieve justice or find truth. Often the system exists to either create business or to enforce popular prejudices. For example no judge is dumb enough to actually believe the cops snagging someone under the excuse of a broken tail light or a car seeming to sway a bit. Cops use false charges to stop drivers and seek out felonies and their promotions and job security are tied to these tactics. The average traffic stop is not in reality a traffic stop at all but it is a fishing expedition and that is even truer at night when cops reason that good people are at home and creeps are out on the roads. On the other hand when a town gets short of money the mayor calls the cop shop and orders a lot of tickets be written to raise money for the towns expenses. And then there are other money grubbing tactics. One is sentencing a lot of people to enforced therapy at a public clinic and forcing them to pay a hefty fee for the therapy and a monthly probation fee on top of that. Wife slaps husband three times and husband responds and slaps back one time and the husband is sentenced to two years of weekly therapy at $60. per week plus $75. per month for probation. The prejudice is that the woman is not charged as she threw the first slap and three times at that whereas the cops prejudice is based on the fact that he can slap harder than his wife supposedly and therefore he gets busted, all the while the judge goes along with the ride knowing that the public clinic is so bad that it could not diagnose mustard on a ham sandwich but the city just collected 104 weeks multiplied by 60 dollars a week plus 24 months at $75 per month for probation. We are talking about big bucks folks. And a joint or walking a bit drunk can get you exactly that kind of sentence. In my area if you get caught sleeping on the beach three times you can be considered a felon and actually put in prison. In reality we have no justice system, no law and very little order and the order we do have is often the wrong kind.
What would Constitutional Law be viewed like if it was handled by a Machine Learning program wraped in AIML? Would Citizens United still be?
Just burn it fire
There is a project that put German laws into git: Bundesgit
They are versioned (so you can see changes over time).
Perhaps an expert system could look at the laws we have and how they are being used and propose things to simplify them.
At least the system should be able to find the laws applicable to a particular act.
Winning is court depends on the lawyers making the best arguments.
Perhaps for cases with a broad interest, the public could add arguments that the lawyers should wish they had made.
Better video games to keep folks occupied instead of out committing crimes in the first place.
Perhaps this is the solution to ISIS?
The only thing which can improve the judicial system is making it as luddite as possible. US has a common law legal system. All common law systems have O(n!) complexity. Any attempts to fight the expanding complexity by hiring more lawyers are attempts at linear scaling (O(n)) solutions to O(n!) problems. Adding computers into the mix allows for exponential solutions O(n^K). Which creates the illusion of solving the problem because O(n^K) > O(n). But, for sufficiently large n and any fixed K, O(n^K) O(n!). So this creates a problem which will manifest itself as the system collapses under its own complexity with justice becoming completely impossible. The only reason that common law system existed and were viable before computers is that people forget. So all attempts at hiring more lawyers go out the windows and O(n) does grow very large; laws which are at the centers of the nodes which cause common law spider web of irrevocable "precedents" get repealed. But hiding this obvious need for repealing certain laws inside of the O(n^k) solutions makes near impossible to discern which laws need repealing. Which causes the whole legal system to collapse. The only solution to winning this game is not to play.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
A main problem today is the inability to see laws and see changes. Technology can index laws, show diffs, link to what changed the law, relate to political spectrums and parties, show concrete links to money and activities allowing for transparency.
Step 1: Publish all laws in a standard format
Step 2: Publish all law changes in standard format
Step 3: See above
Step 4: Transparency and democracy evolve
Problem with the legal system isn't technology, but that it's not truth seeking. You can't have a fair legal system unless you have one that seeks the truth, because without the truth the wrong side might win: http://netk.net.au/whitton/ocls.pdf
One could invest in Tech stocks then use the profits to selectively bribe members of the courts system to act in a manner which from the outside looks consistent with justice-for-all.
Requiem for the American Dream
Look at Norway if you want to see a functioning system. It is not a technological problem it is a political, sociological, and phsychological problem. Have a look and read carefully this comment on the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/com...
Technology will make the law a much more powerful ass. After much outrage and corrections it will help.
Insist that ALL laws be open to the public, not hiding behind expensive pay-walls. Legal decisions that affect literally millions of people are available only to those with the $$$ to pay to view the decisions. Those with out access to the decisions get shuffled through the courts and squirted into prison with out an real avenue of defense.
Laws hidden behind some secret court order are not laws but just so much junk. Unless one knows a law exists one can not obey the law. Hiding laws and then bringing them to court with secrecy demands is totally ridiculous!
global optima.
We have FUBARed our country with laws. We need to repeal all laws and supreme court decisions from 1776 forward, wait 20 years to see what problems really exist, and then begin again.
Anarchy would be way better than the country-size debtor's prison we have become.
fMRI can improve Judicial system;
Casteism
All rise for the honorable R2-D2. Processsing.... Robo-Judge says you are guilty! Pay these fines. All your property are belong to us! Sit in this cage with this rapist!
The simple things like serving papers, swearing and affirming affidavits and filing documents seem like obvious areas that can be improved by tech. Yeah, for the big firms who can expense, with a markup, all of that to the client have no problem hiring firms but for the rest of us, service, filing and affidavits take up a huge amount of time and really handicap the not rich. Big firms have much more time to prepare than the little guys because of the time it takes just to do these three simple things
Eliminate Judges from the process as much as possible. Yes, software can help this immensely, but first ambiguity and other "designed-in" loopholes in laws have to be removed (analysis tools anyone?). What's next, work on eliminating the lawyers. Fixing "laws" or "the law" is paramount. An ambiguous "law" or "law" that is inaccessible to the "common man", is not law, but rather a crime against the people whom it purports to serve.