« Ind. Gov't. - More on "Welfare officials to reveal post-IBM process" [Updated] | Main | Ind. Courts - "Judge and prosecutor argue over sex offender plea" »

Friday, October 23, 2009

Courts - "Were hundreds of criminals in Maryland given the wrong sentences because lawyers messed up a basic work sheet?"

That is the headline to this Oct. 22, 2009 story in Slate, reported by Ray Fisman. It is a long article that you will need to read closely, but here are a few quotes:

In early 2005, Emily Owens was halfway through her Ph.D. thesis in economics at the University of Maryland. Her topic: the deterrence effect of long prison sentences. She had just received data from the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy on tens of thousands of cases that had appeared in the state's courts over the previous years, cases she hoped would help her close out her dissertation. But as she started working through the numbers, she came across thousands of inconsistencies and errors in the sentencing recommendations provided to judges by the commission. The errors ultimately translated into extra months and years of prison time for unlucky convicts and light sentences for lucky ones. What might have been a run of the mill economic analysis of crime and punishment turned into a shocking account of human error.

In addition to the usual information on defendants and their crimes, Owens' data set included sentence recommendations provided to judges to guide their punishment decisions. The sentencing guidelines—based on a work sheet that graded the severity of a convict's crime and his risk to society—were meant to make the administration of justice a little less arbitrary: Similar cases should lead to similar penalties.

To get acquainted with her data, Owens programmed the work sheet and its scoring system into her computer, fed in the case data, and expected to see her program spit out the set of sentences that had been provided to judges presiding over these cases. Most of the time, the two sets of numbers were the same. Yet no amount of checking and rechecking could account for a dismaying number of inconsistencies: In a little over 10 percent of cases, she just couldn't reconcile her figures with those of the commission.

After reviewing the original work sheets and consulting with the Sentencing Policy Commission's director, Owens concluded that neither her math nor her data were to blame. A system designed to make justice more predictable was producing errors in one out of every 10 trials. * * *

With the stakes so high—months and years of freedom gained or lost—how could Maryland's Sentencing Policy Commission have been so sloppy? For academic research—a matter trivial by comparison—it's common to have data entered independently by at least two typists, whose output is then cross-checked for accuracy. Yet it turns out that complacent bureaucrats weren't to blame for the sentencing mistakes. The work sheet had to be filled out by the state attorney prosecuting the case, with the final form signed and approved by the defense attorney (who, if he was doing his job properly, would have done the work sheet calculations independently). The commission had, by design, handed off the task of work sheet completion to parties that it assumed would have every incentive to get the numbers right, but it apparently never accounted for widespread incompetence in Maryland's legal profession.*
________________
*The work sheet generated separate “scores” for the felon and his crime. The recommended sentence was then read off a table with offender and offense scores corresponding to the rows and columns of a grid. More than 90 percent of errors resulted from the person completing the work sheet entering the figure from a cell next to the correct one. (Using, say, a ruler to get to the correct cell would have prevented this.) The remaining errors came mostly from incorrect choice of criminal statute in calculating the offense score and from a handful of math errors (in operations that were literally as simple as adding two plus two).

Here is the 45-page paper that resulted. Note that is is not that new -- Oct. 2008.

The Slate story also links to this 16-page, Jan., 1999 US DOJ Special Report on "Truth in Sentencing in State Prisons."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 23, 2009 06:19 PM
Posted to Courts in general