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n February 2013, Eric Loomis was found driving a car that had been used in a shooting. He was arrested, and pleaded guilty to eluding an officer. In determining his sentence, a judge looked not just to his criminal record, but also to a score assigned by a tool called COMPAS.
Developed by a private company called Equivant (formerly Northpointe), COMPAS—or the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions—purports to predict a defendant's risk of committing another crime. It works through a proprietary algorithm that considers some of the answers to a 137-item questionnaire.
COMPAS is one of several such risk-assessment algorithms being used around the country to predict hot spots of violent crime, determine the types of supervision that inmates might need, or—as in Loomis's case—provide information that might be useful in sentencing. COMPAS classified him as high-risk of re-offending, and Loomis was sentenced to six years.
He appealed the ruling on the grounds that the judge, in considering the outcome of an algorithm whose inner workings were secretive and could not be examined, violated due process. The appeal went up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, who ruled against Loomis, noting that the sentence would have been the same had COMPAS never been consulted. Their ruling, however, urged caution and skepticism in the algorithm's use.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/equivant-compas-algorithm/550646/
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 22 2018, @01:08AM
Victim statements are not the only testimony allowed at sentencing hearings. It depends on the venue and the judge, but sometimes you also get statements from "character witnesses" for the defense and occasionally expert witnesses. (Sentencing in death penalty cases can be particularly prolonged.)
But yes, the value of victim statements is debatable.