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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Yes, the lower court was predictably unable to predict the higher court's judgements the majority of the time.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>We're not likely to eliminate these factors any time soon.
> That may be acceptable as long as it’s one tool in many, he said, but data shouldn’t drive the entire justice system.<p>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.
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.<p>So if a young person displeases you, then all such young people will be simply marked as a threat +1 by your brain
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.
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.