And by this, I mean the Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act of 2024, which gives the defendants the right to review any computer program used to evaluate evidence or make sentencing recommendations.
As I have observed previously, the software is rife with sloppy coding, erroneous assumptions, and flat out racism, so creating a right to review is the 2nd best way to address this. (The best way to address this is to require that any software used is developed by and owned by the government, and that its complete source code be made publicly available)
Democratic lawmakers once again have proposed legislation to ensure that the software source code used for criminal investigations can be examined and is subject to standardized testing by the government.
On Thursday House Representatives Mark Takano (D-CA) and Dwight Evans (D-PA) reintroduced the Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act of 2024, a draft law that forbids using trade secret claims from barring defense attorneys from reviewing source code relevant to criminal cases and establishes a federal testing regime for forensic software.
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Often this isn't the case because makers of forensic software can resist public review of their source code by claiming it's classified as a trade secret.
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And yet they do. Northpointe, the developer of a system called COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), used for calculating recidivism risk to inform pre- and post-trial decisions, considers its system to be proprietary and has refused to reveal how it works.
But the outputs of the program clearly show bigotry coded in. ProPublica reported on this in 2016 on this specific piece of software.
It's not just sentencing recommendations though, it's also DNA screening software, fingerprint analysis, facial recognition, and ballistic analysis (Ballistic analysis has been ruled junk science in Maryland), etc.
This sh%4 is positively Kafkaesque.
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