Author: Jeff Ward
Publisher: Judicature
Publication Year: 2019
Summary: The following article features Professor Jeff Ward of Duke University who discusses how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in courtrooms. Current AI tools are effective in very specific use cases. However, court systems have begun to use algorithms to determine if someone is likely to recommit a crime. This raises the issue of bias in the judicial system even before AI came about. If the algorithm is trained on prior court cases, then it is being trained on biased cases that locked up Black and Latino men at disproportionately high rates. This would cause the algorithm to rank Black and Latino men as more likely to recommit crimes, continuing the court system’s legacy of racial injustice. While it should be carefully considered whether to incorporate this technology in courtrooms, if prosecutors do insist on using them, the variables used in the model should be public knowledge. Any algorithm used in legal proceedings should have a massive body of research conducted on them by AI professionals to ensure it is not biased and correctly classifies people without using race/ethnicity as a variable at all.