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Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @03:39AM
I was talking with a judge once about the Victim Impact Statements and their effect on the sentences given out. According to him, in the majority of cases, they don't change a thing as they just aren't useful or reiterate stuff he already knows from other sources. In the minority of cases, they cause him to reduce the sentence as the reaction of the defendant is one of genuine remorse or the victim makes a good case for probation modifications. In one case, however, it actually caused him to increase his sentence as the victim asked him to reduce the defendant's sentence because it wasn't the Christian thing to punish him as she forgave him, didn't believe in that sort of retribution and similar things while being moved to tears; the defendant, on the other hand, was completely unmoved and even called the victim "a stupid bitch" as she walked past to her seat. Judge decided to turn the few hundred dollars in restitution (which the victim had declined) into a fine in the tens of thousands thanks to that remark.