Jury Sentencing as Democratic Practice

After a century of reform and experimentation, sentencing remains a highly contested area of the criminal justice system. Scholars as well as the public at large disagree about the proper purposes and functions of punishment, and dissatisfaction with the sentencing status quo is high. Most recent critiques of the sentencing process have focused on the amount of discretion tolerated by the system. This Article goes further in arguing that the source of sentencing discretion is also very important to the legitimacy and integrity of the sentencing process. In the absence of wide consensus on sentencing goals, it is best to leave the sentencing decision with a deliberative democratic institution - the jury. This Article makes the case for jury sentencing from three perspectives: the historical, the theoretical, and the practical. Part I of this Article surveys the history of jury sentencing from colonial times to the present. This history reveals that jury sentencing - a uniquely American innovation - was a valued democratic institution in the early republic, but was gradually abandoned in the twentieth century as scientific approaches to punishment came into favor. The most recent developments from the Supreme Court suggest, however, that jury sentencing may be on the rise again. Part II enlists the insights of modern political theory, and particularly, the ideas of deliberative democratic theory, to show that the movement away from jury sentencing has not been entirely healthy for either the sentencing process or our democracy as a whole. Part III addresses the practical objections that have been leveled against jury sentencing, and suggests that the vast majority of these are either exaggerated or equally present in alternative sentencing regimes. The jury, therefore, emerges as an equally competent, yet more legitimate sentencing institution. Finally, Part IV outlines the actual contours of a possible jury sentencing regime that balances the democratic virtues of jury involvement with efficiency, uniformity, and other values important to the sentencing process

Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines

Generative search engines directly generate responses to user queries, along with in-line citations. A prerequisite trait of a trustworthy generative search engine is verifiability, i.e., systems should cite comprehensively (high citation recall; all statements are fully supported by citations) and accurately (high citation precision; every cite supports its associated statement). We conduct human evaluation to audit four popular generative search engines -- Bing Chat, NeevaAI, perplexity.ai, and YouChat -- across a diverse set of queries from a variety of sources (e.g., historical Google user queries, dynamically-collected open-ended questions on Reddit, etc.). We find that responses from existing generative search engines are fluent and appear informative, but frequently contain unsupported statements and inaccurate citations: on average, a mere 51.5% of generated sentences are fully supported by citations and only 74.5% of citations support their associated sentence. We believe that these results are concerningly low for systems that may serve as a primary tool for information-seeking users, especially given their facade of trustworthiness. We hope that our results further motivate the development of trustworthy generative search engines and help researchers and users better understand the shortcomings of existing commercial systems.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figure

Democracy under uncertainty: The ‘wisdom of crowds’ and the free-rider problem in group decision making

We introduce a game theory model of individual decisions to cooperate by contributing personal resources to group decisions versus by free-riding on the contributions of other members. In contrast to most public-goods games that assume group returns are linear in individual contributions, the present model assumes decreasing marginal group production as a function of aggregate individual contributions. This diminishing marginal returns assumption is more realistic and generates starkly different predictions compared to the linear model. One important implication is that, under most conditions, there exist equilibria where some, but not all members of a group contribute, even with completely self-interested motives. An agent-based simulation confirms the individual and group advantages of the equilibria in which behavioral asymmetry emerges from a game structure that is a priori perfectly symmetric for all agents (all agents have the same payoff function and action space, but take different actions in equilibria). And a behavioral experiment demonstrates that cooperators and free-riders coexist in a stable manner in groups performing with the non-linear production function. A collateral result demonstrates that, compared to a ―dictatorial‖ decision scheme guided by the best member in a group, the majority-plurality decision rules can pool information effectively and produce greater individual net welfare at equilibrium, even if free-riding is not sanctioned. This is an original proof that cooperation in ad hoc decision-making groups can be understood in terms of self-interested motivations and that, despite the free-rider problem, majority-plurality decision rules can function robustly as simple, efficient social decision heuristics.group decision making under uncertainty, free-rider problem, majority-plurality rules, marginally-diminishing group returns, evolutionary games, behavioral experiment

The Rhetoric of Motive and Intent

This article offers a critical analysis of the traditional maxim that motive is irrelevant to criminal liability. It retraces the history of this principle to show how its meaning has changed and its validity has declined over time. Originally promoted by reformers, the irrelevance of motive maxim derived meaning from their efforts to codify criminal law. In this context, the irrelevance of motive stood for two related reforms: (1) legislators should condition criminal liability on expectations of harm rather than desires, and (2) courts should require proof of statutory mental elements. With the success of codification, however, the irrelevance of motive maxim has fragmented into two different propositions, one lacking authority, and one lacking content. If motives are understood as desires, the claim that motive is irrelevant to criminal liability is descriptively inaccurate, because modern codes define both offenses and defenses in terms of desires. If motives are taken to be mental states other than those defined as offense or defense elements, the motive is irrelevant maxim is true, but trivial. The article applies this critique to numerous contemporary controversies, including the propriety of hate crime enhancements

From Predominance to Resolvability : A New Approach to Regulating Class Actions

Class actions incite both delight and disgust. Several complementary themes in popular culture embrace the class action, including sympathy for underdog litigants challenging powerful malefactors, fascination with massive redistributions of wealth from corporations to individuals, and reluctance to permit large and influential wrongdoers to escape justice merely because of their size and clout. Class actions have thus become an appealing procedural counterweight to the burdens that modern society imposes on consumers and citizens, giving many little Davids a fighting chance for protection from or retribution against political and economic Goliaths. But class actions also expose and rile competing visions of the judicial system: suspicion of large-scale judicial proceedings, wariness of high-paid plaintiffs\u27 lawyers, and a sense that society may subsidize the jackpot payouts that often result from group litigation and settlement. These crosscurrents of attraction and repulsion have propelled class actions to a level of political and academic prominence far exceeding the attention devoted to any other aspect of civil procedure. Despite the critical attention focused on class actions, the debate over how best to reform them has not identified a conceptual flaw at the core of their design. Academic scrutiny of class actions over the past sixty years has usually built upon three overlapping themes: the potential utility and fairness (or disutility and unfairness) of aggregating individual claims as a solution to collective action problems that inhibit enforcement of substantive rights, the extent and significance of agency costs and diminished individual autonomy in representative litigation, and the relative roles that courts, legislators, and administrative agencies should play in redressing widespread injuries. These themes at an abstract level frame the debate over whether class actions are desirable as a matter of public policy, and at a technical level frame arguments for or against the myriad procedural reforms that scholars and legislators have proposed to expand, curtail, or manage class litigation. However, analysis of whether and how to reform class actions often overlooks a critical theoretical concept that has little direct connection to either the collective action, agency cost, or institutional role strands of class action scholarship. This Article seeks to correct that theoretical oversight, to explore some of its practical implications, and to demonstrate how rethinking the principles that animate class actions reveals a novel avenue of class action reform

Master of Science

thesisTechnological innovations have increased the ability to collect and store information. However, these innovations potentially create a psychological problem because the increasing amounts of information must be managed within the still limited human cognitive processing capacity. One common data visualization approach to improve information search is the concept of increased bottom-up stimulus-driven saliency to guide the user. But is increasing the salience of an item enough to produce a sufficient, efficient search with high decision accuracy? How does increasing the salience of an item without regard to its relevance affect the search for information? Is there a difference between lists and tag clouds and what role does the system context; play? To answer these questions we adapted the concepts of the Wason selection task (WST) and considered the propositional logic values of P, Q, not P and not Q, to analyze search sufficiency, efficiency, decision accuracy and search patterns. We found that the incongruence or congruence of salience and relevance can impede or support the search for information. However, increasing the salience of relevant items is not enough to insure a sufficient or efficient search with an accurate decision. The search for information is affected by interactions between the display format, the system context; and the congruence conditions

Improving water asset management when data are sparse

Ensuring the high of assets in water utilities is critically important and requires continuous improvement. This is due to the need to minimise risk of harm to human health and the environment from contaminated drinking water. Continuous improvement and innovation in water asset management are therefore, necessary and are driven by (i) increased regulatory requirements on serviceability; (ii) high maintenance costs, (iii) higher customer expectations, and (iv) enhanced environmental and health/safety requirements. High quality data on asset failures, maintenance, and operations are key requirements for developing reliability models. However, a literature search revealed that, in practice, there is sometimes limited data in water utilities - particularly for over-ground assets. Perhaps surprisingly, there is often a mismatch between the ambitions of sophisticated reliability tools and the availability of asset data water utilities are able to draw upon to implement them in practice. This research provides models to support decision-making in water utility asset management when there is limited data. Three approaches for assessing asset condition, maintenance effectiveness and selecting maintenance regimes for specific asset groups were developed. Expert elicitation was used to test and apply the developed decision-support tools. A major regional water utility in England was used as a case study to investigate and test the developed approaches. The new approach achieved improved precision in asset condition assessment (Figure 3–3a) - supporting the requirements of the UK Capital Maintenance Planning Common Framework. Critically, the thesis demonstrated that, on occasion, assets were sometimes misallocated by more than 50% between condition grades when using current approaches. Expert opinions were also sought for assessing maintenance effectiveness, and a new approach was tested with over-ground assets. The new approach’s value was demonstrated by the capability to account for finer measurements (as low as 10%) of maintenance effectiveness (Table 4-4). An asset maintenance regime selection approach was developed to support decision-making when data are sparse. The value of the approach is its versatility in selecting different regimes for different asset groups, and specifically accounting for the assets unique performance variables