
Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses - fraqed
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/09/judges-issue-longer-sentences-when-their-college-football-team-loses/498980/?single_page=true
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jdminhbg
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 a good solution.

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dogma1138
Having a panel of judges that is "isolated" from each other outside of the
courtroom can help reduce the likelihood of these things happening.

Having attentive clerks as well as maybe mandatory psychiatric counseling for
judges can also resolve some issues.

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corecoder
What about running these statistics (correlating decisions with day of week,
hour of day, etc.) for each judge, and then just tell them: see, in the past
year you acted in this not very bright way; maybe you should think about the
way you do your job? And, by the way, we'll keep running these statistics on
how you judge.

Being made aware of our own biases is often the most effective way to make the
situation better.

~~~
dogma1138
Could be but statistics are tricky.

Hour of day / day of week can easily be skewed by the system at large.

For example more bar fights over the weekends, more violent crime during the
heat waves in the summer, more prank crimes involving young first time
offenders during school breaks (e.g. spring break), more cases of spousal
abuse during the holiday season etc.

Just having the numbers and saying here you are biased isn't really easy
because it might not be possible to actually determine true bias from them.

~~~
corecoder
That's true, mine was an oversimplification and the numbers would require more
analysis; it would be a worthwhile analysis nonetheless, IMO.

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nxzero
Once had the very surreal experience while in court waiting to litigate a case
to object to a higher court's jurisdiction over a case; my motion was granted,
and the case was sent to the lower court.

While waiting for the above motion to be heard for over an hour, the person
directly behind me was calling how the judge would respond to various matters
that required the judge's opinion. Having nothing to do, since mobile device
weren't allowed, I listened to the predictions made and the outcome. The
predictions were wrong most of the time.

As I stated earlier, my motion to send the complaint back to the lower court
was granted and it turns out that the person behind me was the judge for the
lower court.

Yes, the lower court was predictably unable to predict the higher court's
judgements the majority of the time.

To me, this if it holds true statistically across the legal system in a blind
test of judges -- it is a major issue; normally, judges don't want to publicly
rule against another judge unless it's obvious the other judge was wrong.

Strange end to my experience was that I won in the lower court and the other
party failed to appeal the judgement in a timely manner; meaning my motion to
dismiss the appeal was granted based on it being filed one day late by the
opposing party by the higher court. Always wondered what would have happened
if the higher court had heard the case and issued a judgement; lucky that
never happened.

~~~
acbabis
I was under the impression that you only have multiple courts review a case
when the case is appealed. Wouldn't cases that are appealed be biased in favor
of unpredictability by the fact that people _believed_ they could be reversed?

~~~
nxzero
Happy to address the question, but it's not clear to me exactly what the
question is.

In the example I provided the lower court and court above it shared
jurisdiction over the case by law. Generally, upper courts for case load
reasons will not hear a case that's not an appeal. In this case, the higher
court considered hearing the case based on the arguments of the other party,
but I won based on my arguments that as a result of the contract between the
parties the lower court was explicitly the only court that had jurisdiction
over the matter.

For what it's worth, I'm not an attorney, just skilled at legal matters and
litigation; as an example, once had a judge issue an order by phone for me and
have their clerk draft the order too - ask any attorney if they've ever done
that... :-)

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acbabis
That's interesting. I wasn't aware that cases in the jurisdiction of a lower
court could "skip" the lower court.

And it appears I misread your earlier point. You were talking about the lower
court "predicting" the higher court, and not deciding on the same cases. My
point was that cases that go to multiple courts are the ones that are hard to
decide, but it's moot.

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Broken_Hippo
I generally think a focus on restoring the person to a good citizen is a
bonus: There is no point in putting someone with an anger problem in prison if
you aren't going to take care of the anger problem while they are there just
like it isn't likely that a prison sentence is going to help much if your main
problem is that you were nearly starving or addicted to drugs.

Nonetheless, I do believe this is where education, information, and standards
should come into play. We should expect training so that judges can overcome
things like the result of emotions on sentencing. We should have
recommendations of standards for sentencing, and public feedback on how the
judge tends to lean. With numbers, a particilar judge can know they are more
harsh after lunch, more lenient on women, and other such things. They can look
to see what the average sentence range is for the basic situation (x-y for
first offense: y-z for second, etc).

Some folks have mentioned a computer system, and I don't think this is all
that bad of an idea if used wisely. More like information and suggested
sentencing: First offense? Age? Family? Extenuating circumstances that might
require leniency or harshness? and then get a range of recommendations with
their effectiveness rates.

I do think it is prudent to have sentences seconded by a separate judge,
especially if the judge is towards or over the harsher end of the punishments
or too far into the leniency. I do think they might get rubber-stamped if not
done correctly, but I also think this would get judges to consider outcomes.

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anexprogrammer
Given there's research showing harshness increases over time until lunch then
dropping markedly, then increasing again over the afternoon this isn't
terribly surprising.

We're not likely to eliminate these factors any time soon.

~~~
hackuser
> We're not likely to eliminate these factors any time soon.

I disagree. Knowing about them can make a big difference, and training can
teach people to avoid these errors.

~~~
anexprogrammer
We can mitigate them _to some extent_ with awareness and training.

With research seeming to show subconscious biases remarkably difficult to
remove, I sincerely doubt they can be eliminated. We haven't managed it in
society and the workplace despite significant legislative effort.

~~~
hackuser
> I sincerely doubt they can be eliminated. We haven't managed it in society
> and the workplace despite significant legislative effort.

Right. Who made the standard (for anything!) 100% success?

But society and the workplace have greatly improved, through social effort and
also the resulting legislative one. Just 60 years ago, women were only allowed
to be teachers and nurses; not long before that, they needed their husband's
permission to get a job and were locked out of higher education for the most
part. Now most college graduates are women and most law school graduates are
women. 65 years ago the U.S. had segregation! Now a black man is President,
the black middle-class has exploded, etc. Look also at attitudes toward race,
sexual orientation, religion - look at surveys from the 50s and 60s (and
later).

In fact, I think the pessimism in the above comment is completely backward.
The track record is of amazing revolutions in human affairs.

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anexprogrammer
We're not really disagreeing you know. That we can't eliminate shouldn't
discourage us from striving to continue to improve.

Human judges are the least worst option we have, despite and because of
fallible human factors.

Society has made huge progress, and is in many respects infinitely improved.
Yet ethnic minorities are still subject to racism even from the Police and
judicial system, women don't get paid as highly or get proportionately into
senior or board roles.

I'm not suggesting we stop, or seeing it pessimistically.

~~~
hackuser
Sorry I misunderstood!

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romanovcode
It's also proven that judges make harsher sentences just before the lunchtime.
(Because they're hungry)

~~~
hiddenkrypt
The study that suggested (not proven) that was found to have some flaws:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463053)

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finid
> That may be acceptable as long as it’s one tool in many, he said, but data
> shouldn’t drive the entire justice system.

Data has always driven all the decisions we make. It's just that in the past,
before big data, our personal computers (read: brains) did the data wrangling.
By the way, we still do it. It's how humans and other living things employ
profiling.

~~~
Terr_
"The checks and balances of democratic governments were invented because
humans themselves realized how unfit they were to govern themselves. They
needed a system, yes. An industrial age machine."

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deviate_X
Human's are rarely rational in a way that could be understood to be accepted
as absolute, we are overwhelmingly emotional creatures just like every other
creature in existence.

So if a young person displeases you, then all such young people will be simply
marked as a threat +1 by your brain

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888uuii
None of this is going to get any easier until widespread recognition of the
next objective of humanity as permanently ending human killing and torture
gains universal or universally-implementable acceptance.

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kldaace
I'm going to wait for more replication before I adjust my priors too much on
this. It seems plausible prima facie, but I'm suspicious of their methodology.
From the article (I don't have access to the working paper), it sounds like
they might have been trying to test the significance of a lot of different
variables, and this might just be the one that popped up.

~~~
maxerickson
If you have "priors" that you can adjust, that suggests you think you are an
explicit Bayesian reasoner.

It's incoherent to take on that identity and then ignore new information. You
should just conjure probabilities from this incident that will have an
acceptably low impact on your priors.

~~~
kldaace
I'm not ignoring new information, I'm just saying my priors are strong enough
and the evidence is weak enough that this won't make me change my beliefs "too
much."

