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Judges in the United States tend to give defendants longer sentences the day after switching to daylight saving time compared with other days of the year, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Previous research has shown that people tend to sacrifice, on average, about 40 minutes of sleep when they "spring forward" to daylight saving time, and even this small amount of lost sleep can have negative consequences, including an increase in workplace injuries, slacking off at work, and auto accidents. The results of this new research suggest that shortened sleep associated with the change to daylight saving time might also affect the severity of sentences doled out by judges.
"We find that the sentences given to those convicted of crimes may be partially polluted by the sleep of those giving the punishments," says researcher Kyoungmin Cho of the University of Washington, first author on the study. "Sleep is a factor that should not play a role in their sentences, but does."
Journal Reference:
Kyoungmin Cho, Christopher M. Barnes, Cristiano L. Guanara. Sleepy Punishers Are Harsh Punishers: Daylight Saving Time and Legal Sentences. Psychological Science, 2016 DOI: 10.1177/0956797616678437
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Monday January 02 2017, @03:34PM
Another famous one is How long since a judge ate before ruling on your case [propublica.org]
Judges are human and prone to human mistakes, and the really awful part is that more objectivity isn't really the answer, because there is a lot of subjectivity to how to treat each individual case. I hate cases like this where I know something is deeply wrong, but have no real insight on how to improve matters.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Monday January 02 2017, @03:42PM
Our so-called representatives could fix this by not making every other offense a decade or longer sentence.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @03:44PM
The obvious answer is to have an order of magnitude more judges, and use some sort of score voting or median type system to form a consensus and reject the crankiest judges. (To let the system function in real time, while avoiding systematic biases arising from conventional sleeping and meal times, we'll keep them in cages with staggered sleep periods and feeding times.) As a bonus, it solves the unemployment apocalypse driverless cars/trucks/buses will cause any day now -- in fact, we can replace the unemployment benefit system with an infinitely expansible judge pool.
Accused of a crime? Face a mob of caged, unemployed, angry bastards just like you -- a judge and jury of your peers!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @02:03AM
The typical solutions to things like this is to have a real rubric. Much of what's wrong in the justice system is that we have people making judgments about how long people go to prison based upon their personal feelings or even worse are the places where there's mandatory minimums that don't take into account mitigating factors.
Teachers use rubrics to try and make the process a lot more efficient. There's always a bit of slop in it as assignments aren't always easily graded, but with a rubric, the variance in scores due to things other than the work is greatly reduced.
Also, it's probably time to have a separate official handling the sentencing that's only aware of what the jury found, and has no idea what the various socio-economic groupings the various parties are from.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Tuesday January 03 2017, @11:49AM
Sentencing guidelines already exist and a lot of people are bullied and pushed through the system without a trial, because everyone in the courthouse will tell you that going to trial will only make your sentence worse... The so called "justice" system needs to be torn down and completely redesigned, adding more layers of complexity and bureaucracy will fix nothing. "The law" should be able to fit in a small pamphlet and be easily known to everyone, not impossible to understand without years of study.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 02 2017, @04:07PM
Yeah, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. One of the even more distressing ones are the studies that seem to show that judges seem prone to the "gambler's fallacy" illusion where they think that because a case or two went one way that they should likely have a case ruling the other way coming up. One such study looked at granting asylum cases [stanford.edu] to refugees and found that if a judge had granted asylum in the previous two cases that the next request's chances of getting asylum were reduced by 6.7% from the normal grant rate.
So, if you're unlucky enough to be scheduled on a day when the previous people had strong requests, your chances of getting it are reduced -- not by a HUGE amount, but I'm sure that's no comfort to those refugees whose lives are sometimes on the line.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday January 02 2017, @09:34PM
I disagree. Discretion becomes prejudice. Why should two people receive different punishments for the same crime? Too often one person is punished severely while another is let off with a warning just because of race, or economic status, or or because one of them is a cop.
I think laws should be written like computer code; clearly and concisely and with no room for interpretation, and then actually executed as written. At least then a person could know what is legal and what is not, which was the whole purpose of having written law in the first place (thank Hammurabi). Discretion results in armed thugs enforcing their will with little regard for the actual law.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 03 2017, @03:22PM
Oh boy, now we get the prejudices of the coders instead.
As someone who writes perfectly logical code for a living, the hundreds of exceptions I don't think of while carefully planning my software every single week(most of which are caught by my own testing) hint at the great danger in trusting in your ability to see all ends ahead of time.
Almost every single one of the bugs my code generates are edge are cases where if I saw the input in front of me and was asked to process it as a person, I'd know exactly what to do. I feel like you're falling into the classic software engineer trap of assuming that the people who build something will be constantly vigilant for its failures.
They're not. They're congressmen.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday January 03 2017, @09:05PM
At least the code would be consistent and open source, instead of each enforcer having their own secret code of law. As it is, like I said before, enforcers will "interpret" the law more harshly for people they don't like. You have to sanitize your inputs. Maybe this could be accomplished by blind trials, where the judge and jury can't actually see or hear anyone, just read a (grammar corrected) transcript of what they say, but I don't think that would fly. People think they can spot a liar, so they want to see who they're judging.
Personally I think if a law has too many edge cases, places where discretion is required, then it has been written poorly or should not exist in the first place.
I've seen too many cases where discretion has been abused. I once had a judge tell me that it was okay for cops to break the law if it makes it easier for them to do their job, specifically that it would be okay for a cop to speed in order to finish his patrol by the end of his shift. I asked him if that was the intent then why aren't their exemptions to that effect written into the law. He said "Huh..." and looked confused. These people are not big picture thinkers. The purpose of written law is to have the thinking pre-processed.
Perhaps if there were a beta testing period for each new law, which would allow greater discretion during a trial period, with a review required at the end to decide whether to keep, modify, or toss out the new law. Appeals should then be interpreted based on the revised state, and a modification would start a new trial period.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek