by webrisorLawyer Selection X Artificial Intelligence
Judge-shopping is a legal tactic that has been used by attorneys for a very long time. It essentially consists of manipulating and delaying a case so as to select/avoid judges which are expected to be favorable/unfavorable to one’s cause. Some say it’s a perfectly legitimate strategy, while others call it sneaky and underhanded.
But here’s the thing about judge-shopping: it places the entire focus and responsibility on the presiding judge rather than the acting attorney. The truth is that who your lawyer is may have as much, if not even more, importance as who your judge is. Lawyer selection, however, is still mainly based on recommendations, online reviews and plain ol’ word of mouth. No program had ever been designed to actually quantify a lawyer’s “stats”, for lack of a better term. Until now.
And this is where Premonition could really change the game. It’s essentially an artificial intelligence system that gathers court data to find out which lawyers usually win before which judges. And here’s the kicker: so far, they’ve found no correlation between price and performance! Now obviously Premonition isn’t perfect, and its Chief Innovation Officer, Toby Unwin, has even cautioned that it should be used as the start of a selection process, not as its be-all and end-all. Personally, I think that any program which brings transparency to the legal practice should be welcomed with open arms. Let’s just hope we see something like this in Quebec in the near future!
by webrisorVirtual Reality Allows Jurors to Explore Crime Scenes
The jury experience, much like almost every other facet of the criminal justice system, is sadly still entrenched in the past. Technology has barely begun to make its way into modern courthouses, resulting in long delays and inefficient procedures. Crime scene reconstruction practices mainly rely on the use of photos, videos, medical records, hand-drawn sketches, and even 3D-rendered animations to give jurors an idea of exactly what went down at the scene of the crime. But the main problem with all of these tools is that, at best, they can merely offer an approximation of reality, not reality itself.
Here’s where Mehzeb Chowdhury comes in. This brilliant PhD researcher from Durham University has designed something that may just revolutionize the jury experience. Imagine someone kidnapped Wall-E the robot, locked him in a dark room, and made him watch 100,000 hours of CSI: Miami episodes. The result? Chowdhury’s brainchild: a MABMAT robotic imaging system capable of recording 360-degree HD videos while autonomously roaming a crime scene at the very moment it’s being investigated. This way, every single detail is captured, and the jury gets to see exactly what the police did at the scene of the crime.
As Chowdhury explains, his ultimate goal was to remove the bias and subjective guesswork from the courtroom:
Unlike 3D recreations, [my system] would be true representations of how things were, rather than a user-created propaganda video to sway the jury. The most-problematic aspect of crime scene visits is that, with time, every characteristic of the scene changes in some way or the other. This is called scene degradation. Years could pass between a crime being committed, and a jury scene visit, with very little remaining the same. A contemporaneous snapshot of the entire crime scene would preserve the necessary details for investigation and trial.
I, for one, would welcome this innovation. Jury trials are far from perfect, and riddled with flaws ranging from racial bias to technological limitations. Criminal attorneys already have to be very careful navigating all of these pitfalls. At the very least, adopting such a technology would help avoid crucial facts getting “lost in translation”, and could ultimately be the difference between an acquittal and a life sentence.
If you’ve been convicted of an offence, call Ginzburg Legal in Montreal to speak with a criminal lawyer.
Ginzburg Legal
405 Rue Marie-Morin
Montréal QC
H2Y 2Y1
(514) 710-6749
by webrisorAmazon Patents Police Traffic Stop Drone
The future is now, ladies and gents. Tech giant Amazon just recently secured a patent for small shoulder-mounted police drones. Referred to as “unmanned aerial vehicle assistants”, these devices could be used to provide enhanced support for police during routine traffic stops. Unlike body-mounted cameras such as GoPros, these drones would allow police to examine a pulled-over vehicle before even approaching in person. This has obvious implications on the safety of citizens as well as police officers.
On the flipside, without appropriate policies and accountability, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine significant breaches of our civil liberties. If outfitted with surveillance mechanisms, these drones could engage in a ton of sneaky maneuvers, from audio-recording to thermal scanning. According to Shankar Narayan, technology and liberty project director for the America Civil Liberties Union in Seattle, “The devices, if put into wide use, would no doubt raise new questions about police use of technology […] In a traffic stop, for example, such a drone could fly around the vehicle conducting a search of the inside of the car without an officer ever establishing the required probable cause for such a search“.
Somehow I can’t help but be reminded of those creepy spider robots from Minority Report.
If you’ve been convicted of a driving infraction or offence, call Ginzburg Legal in Montreal to speak with a criminal defense lawyer.
Ginzburg Legal
405 Rue Marie-Morin
Montréal QC
H2Y 2Y1
(514) 710-6749