Legal Magic

There are words that get you a fairer trial - or so say the rumors. Turns of phrase that soften a heart that’s no less metaphorical in sentencing software than it was in human judges. Who’s to say there aren’t? AIs have strange failure modes, and the justice system is not profligate when auditing its own code.

Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a prison yard legend, not a cheat code. But there are spreadsheets that don’t exist that nobody shares with ways of saying the same thing under columns A and B, and when not performing unpaid data analysis for the prisons’ clients, prisoners ponder sentencing patterns and propose patches for the public defense software the government never maintained.