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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: 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