Adversarial Scrutiny of Evidentiary Statistical Software
Rediet Abebe, Moritz Hardt, Angela Jin, John Arthur Miller, Ludwig Schmidt, Rebecca Wexler · 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · 2022
The U.S. criminal legal system increasingly relies on software output to convict and incarcerate people. In a large number of cases each year, the government makes these consequential decisions based on evidence from statistical software—such as probabilistic genotyping, environmental audio detection and toolmark analysis tools—that the defense counsel cannot fully cross-examine or scrutinize. This undermines the commitments of the adversarial criminal legal system, which relies on the defense’s ability to probe and test the prosecution’s case to safeguard individual rights.