death penalty news March 18, 2005
USA: Computer Predicts Who Gets the Death Penalty Using non-judicial variables such as race, neural network's 90% accuracy rate casts doubt on fairness of capital punishment Using such non-judicial variables as race, sex and age, an artificial neural network can predict with greater than 90% accuracy who will receive a death sentence. Built and trained by researchers at Loyola University New Orleans, the artificial neural network?a multiprocessor computer that resembles the way biological systems process information?has cast further doubt on the fairness of capital punishment. "Our research can specify the post death-conviction process and can add evidence concerning the fairness or unfairness of the process," says Dee Wood Harper, professor of sociology and criminology. "Predicting execution outcomes for prisoners under a sentence of death utilizing attributes that have no direct bearing on the judicial process has serious implications concerning the fairness of the death penalty." Harper and computer scientist Stamos Karamouzis, who developed the network, reconstructed the profiles of more than 1,300 death row inmates from a national population using simple attributes such as race, sex, age and highest year of education when first imprisoned for a capital offense. "We took a thousand of those profiles and used them to 'train' the network," says Harper. They then tested the system using 300 profiles the network had never seen. It predicted the execution and non-execution rate with greater than 90% accuracy. "What that says to me from a policy point of view is even after conviction the process is arbitrary and seems to be biased in some way," says Harper. "If a machine can tell who's dead and who's not, that's pretty serious. Even after an offender is convicted, these variables influence who's executed and who's not. That's an important finding." The research was reported in Innsbruck, Austria at the 2005 International IASTED Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications. (source: betterhumans.com)
