Could Robot Judges Believe? Epistemic Ambitions of the Criminal Trial as we approach the Digital Age
A Comment on Sarah Summers «Epistemic Ambitions of the Criminal Trial: Truth, Proof, and Rights»
Downloads
Abstract
Criminal proof is unique, in that it must be able to account for the justification of both: accurate fact-finding and a fair trial. This is Sarah Summers’ main message in her article on the epistemic ambitions of the criminal trial, which focusses on belief as a sort of proxy for societal acceptance of truth as a set of facts established by compliance to procedural rules. This commentary tests her finding by scrutinizing whether it is conceivable that robots, complying to all rules, assist in fact-finding with a specific form of legal belief based on a sophisticated probability weighting opaque to humans. The result is in accordance with Sarah Summers: as long as robots cannot explain their beliefs, any criminal proof based on them flounders as it can neither be part of a fair trial nor ensure acceptance in the existing institutional framework.
Keywords
Criminal Proof, Robot Judges, Legal Belief, Participation Rights in Criminal Trials, Evidence Law, Electronic MonkReferences
Adams, D. (1987). Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. William Heinemann.
Ashley, K. (2017). Artificial Intelligence and Legal Analytics: New Tools for Law Practice in the Digital Age. Cambridge University Press.
Ashworth, A. and Redmayne, M. (2010). The Criminal Process (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Buchak, L. (2014). Belief, Credence, and Norms. Philosophical Studies, 169(2), 1-27. https://philpapers.org/archive/BUCBCA.pdf
Duff, A., Farmer, L., Marshall, S. and Tadros, V. (2007). The Trial on Trial (Vol. 3. Towards a Normative Theory of the Trial). Hart Publishing.
European Convention on Human Rights (1950). Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. https://echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf
Fuller, L. L. (1960). Adjudication in the Rule of Law. Proceedings of the American Society of International Law, 54, 1-8.
Gless, S. (2001). Zur «Beweiswürdigungs-Lösung» des BGH. Neue juristische Wochenschrift 54, 306-307.
Gless, S. (2020). AI in the Courtroom: A Comparative Analysis of Machine Evidence in Criminal Trials. Georgetown Journal of International Law, 51, 195-253.
Gless, S., Di, X. and Silverman, E. (2022). Ca(r)veat Emptor: Crowdsourcing Data to Challenge the Testimony of In-Car Technology. Jurimetrics, 62(3), 285-302.
Gless, S. and Richter, T. (2019). Do Exclusionary Rules Ensure a Fair Trial? A Comparative Perspective on Evidentiary Rules. Springer Open.
Heinze, A. (2021). Evidence Illegally Obtained by Private Investigators and Its Use Before International Criminal Tribunals. New Criminal Law Review, 24(2), 212-253.
Hildebrandt, M. (2015). Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law. Edward Elgar.
Ho, H. L. (2021). The Legal Concept of Evidence. In E. N. Zalta and U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence-legal/#toc
Jackson, J. and Summers, S. (2012). The Internalisation of Criminal Evidence: Beyond the Common Law and Civil Law Traditions. Cambridge University Press.
Luhmann, N. (1983). Legitimation durch Verfahren. Suhrkamp.
Ramzan, M., Khan, H. U., Awan, S. M., Ismail, A., Ilya, M. and Mahmood, A. (2019). A Survey on State-of-the-Art Drowsiness Detection Techniques. IEEE Access, 7, 61904-61919.
Ross, L. (2022). The Foundations of Criminal Law Epistemology. Ergo. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361228461_The_Foundations_of_Criminal_Law_Epistemology
Roth, A. (2017). Machine Testimony. The Yale Law Journal, 126(7), 1972-2053.
Summers, S. (2022). Evidential Remedies for Procedural Rights Violations Comparative Criminal Evidence Law and Empirical Research. In J. Ferrer and C. Vázquez (Eds.), Evidential Legal Reasoning: Crossing Civil Law and Common Law Traditions. Cambridge University Press.
Twining, W. (2006). Rethinking Evidence: Exploratory Essays (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Williams, B. (1973). Deciding to Believe. In B. Williams (Ed.), Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers (pp. 1956-1972). Cambridge University Press.
Cases and legislation
Ajdarić v Croatia, nº 20883/09, 13 December 2011.
Anđelković v Serbia, nº 1401/08, 9 April 2013.
Berhani v Albania, nº 847/05, 27 May 2010.
Khamidov v Russia, nº 72118/01, 15 November 2007.
Lhermitte v Belgium [GC], nº 34238/09, ECHR 2016.
Moreira Ferreira v Portugal (No 2) [GC], 19867/12, 11 July 2017.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.33115/udg_bib/qf.i5.22849Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Sabine Gless
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.