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Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

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41–50 of 92 posts

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#41
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't want "impartial" judgements Why? Your argument seems to be that without empathy in the legal system people would go to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. That doesn't really make sense, My argument would be that with empathy in the legal system, unlikeable people from the wrong minority with an unhappy judge would go to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. There is so much disproportionality in the lega…

How would you formalize it without it being exploitable? And what about other things, how about a father who killed the man who raped his daughter? Or a woman who hired some one to kill her abusive partner? How would you estimate damage? it's easy to do with itemised goods but how do you estimate the damage of being abused, raped, how do you put a value on someone's life? These are things we haven't even managed to f…

Laws are already exploitable, and frequently exploited. If you're wondering what to do when the computer gives erroneous results, obviously you'd still have human oversight with the ability to overrule with good cause.

> And what about other things, how about a father who killed the man who raped his daughter? Or a woman who hired some one to kill her abusive partner?

I don't get what makes these particularly hard questions. You have a motive and a crime. There will be some prior on how much a motive adjusts for a crime.

Obviously there is no "correct" answer, as it's a philosophical question. The important thing is that it's a decision made consistently and detached from the specific biases of each case.

> How would you estimate damage? it's easy to do with itemised goods but how do you estimate the damage of being abused, raped, how do you put a value on someone's life?

People already put a value on people's lives. The problem isn't that such a value is inherent to law, it's that it's applied neither consistently or reasonably.

A simple approach to this is to decide upon some general conversions - how much a life is worth, for instance - and when it comes to specific instantiations one can relatively straightforwardly make reasoned deductions about how much suffering a given instantiation of a crime (aka. a specific class of rape) causes in the general case. This would be born of largely of research into the long-term quality-of-life effects of these events, plus a heuristic measure of how much short-term suffering is inflicted.

The difference here isn't that this deduction has to be done. The difference is that this deduction won't change because you're black, because you're rich or because your judge had a leg cramp when they woke up. The difference is that rather than being based on how bad a crime sounds, there is at least some attempt to measure the impact of the damage done.

> How are you going to form a legal argument that can lead to a new precedent to a computer?

Most crimes that we should care about are uninteresting crimes. These are things like violence, property crime and drug offenses and make the vast majority of crimes. New precedents can still be handled on a case-by-case basis (albeit with more regularization to fit the prescribed bases for punishment).

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#42
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't want "impartial" judgements this is how martial law works, the legal system has to take circumstances into account unless you want to the days where we used to send people to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. You can't teach computers empathy and empathy is part of our legal system for better or for worse.

> empathy is part of our legal system I don't see evidence of much empathy in the US justice system.

Brock Turner is a recent high-profile example of it (in a bad way), although that sort of thing may be uncommon.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#44
post #2

A lot of the discussion around this seems to focus on football, but that's just the easily-measurable proxy for a bad mood the authors found. Presumably an argument with a spouse, a poker game loss, a parking ticket, or a bad interaction with a coffee clerk would have the same effect. It's disheartening that justice is so capricious, but setting sentences through the legislature seems even more fraught. I don't have…

sentencing by tribunal. maybe one person could be in a bad mood, but all 3 at the same time?

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I wrote "simple cases" and circumstances could be taken into account as long as the software has access to the person's criminal record, family situation, job, etc. Empathy in the end comes from knowing about the person's background and, assuming it's possible to provide this information to a software program, it could make a decision as good, and maybe better, than a judge (if anything, that will allow th…

We can't get a machine to recommend a movie accurately atm you want it to case judgement? And there are solutions for less attractive people getting harsher sentences, I think the jury sitting with their backs to the courtroom isn't a bad idea, or not even being in the same room at all.

A human also cannot accurately recommend a movie, which means it's not as trivial a task as it seems.

Anyway, an algorithm judgement should not be blindly trusted, and there should be plenty of checks to make sure someone doesn't accidentally get NaN years of detention, but it could have its use.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#46
post #2

A lot of the discussion around this seems to focus on football, but that's just the easily-measurable proxy for a bad mood the authors found. Presumably an argument with a spouse, a poker game loss, a parking ticket, or a bad interaction with a coffee clerk would have the same effect. It's disheartening that justice is so capricious, but setting sentences through the legislature seems even more fraught. I don't have…

The solution is restorative justice, where the focus is on repairing the harm rather than punishment.

For example, sending a drug addict to prison for 10 years doesn't do anything to alleviate the harm of the crime, and in fact is harmful in and of itself, just in a different way.

The law needs to maintain a much closer balance between hurting people and helping people. While hurting criminals does have a deterrent factor, we do have to make sure that after we hurt them we build them back up so they don't reoffend. In the long run, skipping the "build them back up" step is more dangerous than skipping the punishment step. Our laws currently falsely assume that skipping the punishment step is the most dangerous thing to do.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#47
post #2

A lot of the discussion around this seems to focus on football, but that's just the easily-measurable proxy for a bad mood the authors found. Presumably an argument with a spouse, a poker game loss, a parking ticket, or a bad interaction with a coffee clerk would have the same effect. It's disheartening that justice is so capricious, but setting sentences through the legislature seems even more fraught. I don't have…

Well, one thing we have to do for sure is inject tests into the system.

Hire actors to play defense, prosecution, etc, without the judge knowing. Change one variable, and see how different judges react. Black, white, male, female, handicapped, etc. Witnesses, victims, defendant.

At a minimum, publish scores of Judges, so the public can make informed decisions.

Justice has to be blind, or there's no fucking point.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#48
post #2

A lot of the discussion around this seems to focus on football, but that's just the easily-measurable proxy for a bad mood the authors found. Presumably an argument with a spouse, a poker game loss, a parking ticket, or a bad interaction with a coffee clerk would have the same effect. It's disheartening that justice is so capricious, but setting sentences through the legislature seems even more fraught. I don't have…

sentencing by tribunal. maybe one person could be in a bad mood, but all 3 at the same time?

When someone at work is in a foul mood, it creates tension and problems that drag everyone down.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#49
post #30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make judges reconfirm sentences 14 days after the initial sentencing.

What about judges too stubborn to admit they were wrong?

Difficult - and adding to workloads is problematic.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#50
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't want "impartial" judgements this is how martial law works, the legal system has to take circumstances into account unless you want to the days where we used to send people to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. You can't teach computers empathy and empathy is part of our legal system for better or for worse.

> You don't want "impartial" judgements Why? Your argument seems to be that without empathy in the legal system people would go to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. That doesn't really make sense, My argument would be that with empathy in the legal system, unlikeable people from the wrong minority with an unhappy judge would go to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. There is so much disproportionality in the lega…

You do have a good point that certain people receive unjustly harsh sentences when judicial discretion is allowed, and that's part of why the concept of mandatory minimum sentences came about. In practice, though, it has resulted in unjustly harsh sentences for everyone.
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