I'm not saying machines would do better, but this really lays bare how ridiculous the justice system is.
For millennia, systems of justice—including the one Chief Justice Roberts heads—have been based in no small part on human judgment rather than ironclad objective rules. In a criminal context this leads to leniency as often as harshness.
A purely mechanistic justice system would, I suspect, rapidly be seen to be not worthy of the name.
And that's the entire problem.
A priori certainty of legal outcomes isn't a problem to be "fixed", it's a basic requirement of any reliable legal system.
If purely mechanical solutions lead to bad outcomes, that's a good thing! It means those solutions can be acknowledged as bad and removed or reworked. If instead you arbitrarily make the pain go away because it's convenient you're stuck with a bad solution.
This, by the way, is the kind of non-mechanical, subjective analysis judges and juries are expected to perform all the time.
Suppose it were a voluntary option. What happens when Black people prefer AI judge over the white judge?
How often are we really asking about empathy for a situation vs empathy for social privilege?
It would be a parody of the name. Justice depends on context. The world is too complicated for any set of mechanistic rules to cover every possible context.
Attempts to remove context from justice end badly at best and are often intentionally abused to leverage the “justice” system as a weapon.
You should not incentivise people to lie, or give a specific answer.
Nor should you incentivise innocent people to proclaim their guilt
It's like giving someone a longer jail sentence for having a blue aura instead of a pink one.
Because, for instance, accuracy in judgment of sincerity is a basic requirement of getting through any day for any human. In other words, we can certainly judge it accurately enough for many purposes.
Judgement of sincerity is woven into the entirety of court procedures. Why would you exclude this additional relevant data point regarding sincerity of allocution?
"Gee, I'm so sorry I drove drunk, please give me a lower sentence" is so transparently self-interested it should be discarded as evidence.