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posted by cmn32480 on Monday January 02 2017, @02:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the requesting-a-continuance dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @03:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @03:44PM (#448528)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @02:03AM (#448730)

    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

      by t-3 (4907) on Tuesday January 03 2017, @11:49AM (#448858)

      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.