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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]
Promis:
-kgj
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
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 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.
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.
My family has a cottage up in Ontario.
The biggest difference we notice in ER visits is that a) it takes the Canadians forever to remember how to charge people for care, and b) the bill is always much smaller then it would be in the states.
This does not happen because of some deep-ass hard-to-understand-psychological-king-fu they've done with their health market. It's because every year each province sets up a price list (a "Fee Schedule" to use the health care wonk jargon). They generally don't let the fees go up by 10-15% a year without a very good explanation, so the fee we pay today is roughly equivalent to what it would have cost to get the same procedure in America back in the 60s when Canadian Medicare (their name for their universal health system) wrote the first price lists. Hospitals can't charge more then the fee schedule or they lose their government funding, and since everybody uses government hospitals that means they'd go out of business.
State-side they know you'll pay more every year for the same service because what option do you have? Your kid is bleeding, you're at the hospital, and they'll tell you to get back into the car and drive for another half-hour unless you pay up.
This is one reason the US (which only funds healthcare for Federal employees, Federal retirees, 65-year-olds, and the poor) actually paid more per capita for health care then the Canadian Federal government did, despite the fact that the Canadian Feds provide 100% of health funding in that country.
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.
...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.
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.
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?
I think for the most part you have that backwards. If you have money the system takes it from you, if you don't have money it will take your time from you.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.