Article Search Tool and Topic Classifier

This thesis focuses on 3 main tasks related to Document Recommendations. The first approach deals with applying existing techniques on Document Recommendations using Doc2Vec. A robust representation of the same is presented to understand how noise induced in the embedding space affects predictions of the recommendations. The next phase focuses on improving the above recommendations using a Topic Classifier. A Hierarchical Attention Network is employed for this purpose. In order to increase the accuracy of prediction, this work establishes a relation to embedding size of the words in the article. In the last phase, model-agnostic Explainable AI (XAI) techniques are implemented to prove the findings in this thesis. XAI techniques are also employed to show how we can fine tune model hyper-parameters for a black-box model

Digging Them Out Alive

From 2013-2018, we taught a collection of interrelated law and social work clinical courses, which we call “the Unger clinic.” This clinic was part of a major, multi-year criminal justice project, led by the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. The clinic and project responded to a need created by a 2012 Maryland Court of Appeals decision, Unger v. State. It, as later clarified, required that all Maryland prisoners who were convicted by juries before 1981—237 older, long-incarcerated prisoners—be given new trials. This was because prior to 1981 Maryland judges in criminal trials were required to instruct the jury that they—the jury—had the ultimate right to determine the law. Our clinic helped to implement Unger by providing a range of legal services and related social services to many of these prisoners. Through the five years, the great majority of the Unger group were released by agreements, on probation, and not retried. In all, approximately 85% of the 237—that is, 85% of all state prisoners in Maryland convicted by juries of violent crimes before 1981—were released. This article describes why and how we created the Unger Clinic; why we made it interdisciplinary; what the students and we learned in it and from our clients; and what we would do differently. We believe the clinical education model we developed—an interdisciplinary clinic working in partnership with a major legal services provider and a citizens’ advocacy group—can be used effectively to address other significant access-to-justice problems nationally. In the end, the Unger Project has been a criminal justice laboratory. The qualitative experiences support many criminal justice reforms with the overriding lesson being that the continued incarceration of older, long incarcerated prisoners convicted of violent crimes serves no public safety purpose

The BG News May 22, 1996

The BGSU campus student newspaper May 22, 1996. Volume 78 - Issue 150https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/7018/thumbnail.jp

Prosecuting in the Shadow of the Jury

This Article offers an unprecedented empirical window into prosecutorial discretion, drawing on research between 2013 and 2017. The central finding is that jurors play a vital role in federal prosecutors’ decision-making, professional identities, and formulations of justice. This is because even the remote possibility of lay scrutiny creates an opening for prosecutors to make commonsense assessments of (1) the evidence in their cases, (2) the character of witnesses, defendants, and victims, and (3) their own moral and professional character as public servants. By facilitating explicit consideration of the fairness of their cases from a public vantage point, I argue that imagined jurors serve as an ethical resource for prosecutors. Part I reviews contemporary legal and interdisciplinary research on the declining number of jury trials and prosecutorial discretion in the United States. Part II describes the ethnographic research method deployed in this case study. Part III presents the empirical findings of this study with attention to how hypothetical jurors inform prosecutors’ evaluations of their cases, evidence, investigations, and plea agreement discussions. Part IV considers several explanations for hypothetical jurors’ perceived relevance to prosecutors’ work beyond their instrumental and strategic value. Part V concludes that the United States Attorney’s Office that is the subject of this study models the democratizing potential of lay decision-makers, even in hypothetical form. This finding offers a powerful rationale for fortifying the United States jury system and brings a novel perspective to the study of prosecutorial ethics

In the Dock. Examining the UK’s Criminal Justice Response to Trafficking.

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.ASI_2013_SUK_UK_In_the_dock.pdf: 350 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020.0-ASI_2013_SUK_UK_In the dock summary.pdf: 18 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

ACT Family Violence Intervention Program review

This paper reports on a review of the Australian Capital Territory’s Family Violence Intervention Program, which provides an interagency response to family violence matters. The scope of the review was to analyse the program’s activities and outcomes using 2007–08 data provided by participating agencies, supported by in-depth interviews with key stakeholders including victims whose matters had been finalised in court. After the completion of this report, additional data from 2008–09 and 2009–10 was made available by some Family Violence Intervention Program (FVIP) participating agencies. Although not within the scope of this evaluation, these data pointed to some preliminary improvements in the FVIP