Legal challenges in bringing AI evidence to the criminal courtroom

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the criminal justice system. One of the promising applications of AI in this field is the gathering and processing of evidence to investigate and prosecute crime. Despite its great potential, AI evidence also generates novel challenges to the requirements in the European criminal law landscape. This study aims to contribute to the burgeoning body of work on AI in criminal justice, elaborating upon an issue that has not received sufficient attention: the challenges triggered by AI evidence in criminal proceedings. The analysis is based on the norms and standards for evidence and fair trial, which are fleshed out in a large amount of European case law. Through the lens of AI evidence, this contribution aims to reflect on these issues and offer new perspectives, providing recommendations that would help address the identified concerns and ensure that the fair trial standards are effectively respected in the criminal courtroom.

Community Prosecution and Building Trust Across a Racial Divide

Community prosecution seeks input from local groups to shape the priorities of the prosecutor’s office. Prosecutors who listen to the community aim to develop a relationship of trust between the community and the local prosecutor’s office; such outreach is especially valuable in connection with racial minority groups with a history of negative experiences with criminal justice actors. A community prosecution strategy calls for the office to work with community partners both upstream and downstream from the criminal courtroom. The upstream efforts involve diversion of defendants out of criminal proceedings and into treatment and accountability programs outside the courts. Downstream efforts include programs to promote the smooth re-entry of people returning to the community after serving a criminal sentence. Community prosecution is best accomplished in offices committed to collection and use of data, transparency, and accountability to the public.

From Classroom to a Criminal Courtroom

This chapter discusses the author’s transition from being a teacher to being an international criminal Judge. The life of a Judge is much more circumscribed by rules and traditions than the life of a teacher. Both national and international courts have typically adopted codes of professional and ethical conduct, which often include or are accompanied by disciplinary rules to ensure compliance and accountability. It is important to understand that the core mandate of an international criminal court is to try individuals within a governing legal framework and to determine whether—given the specific evidence presented and admitted by the court—the responsibility of an individual accused of international crimes has been established beyond reasonable doubt. The chapter then recounts the author’s experience as an international criminal Judge and assesses whether academics make good criminal Judges.

Historical Narrative Pluralism Within and Beyond International Criminal Courts

This chapter critically reflects on the expectations of historical finality and closure that have typically accompanied the rendering of international criminal judgments. The chapter argues that the historical narratives constructed within the judgments of international criminal courts are subject to a process of ongoing contestation and evolution both within and beyond the courtroom. The chapter reveals two types of narrative pluralism that may arise within the international criminal courtroom: first, inter-court narrative pluralism, which arises where judgments of different courts examine the same mass atrocity situation from different perspectives; and second, intra-court narrative pluralism, which arises where narratives constructed within an international criminal judgment are revisited in later cases adjudicated by the same court. The chapter also identifies a range of social psychological and practical factors that generate gaps between the intended meaning of judicially constructed narratives and their public or social meaning amongst different audiences beyond the courtroom.

Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Judges’ Footing Shifts in Criminal Courtroom

The paper, based on the concept of FOOTING, makes a multimodal discourse analysis of the relationship between the judge’s discourse and his footing shifts in a criminal courtroom. The results show that in the interaction, multimodal resources in judges’ discourse include conversational features (prolonging keywords, interrupting, repeating, taking turns, etc.), acoustic ones (ascending F0 for pitches and dB for intensity, transition tracks between consonants and formants of vowels, duration of some keywords in important sentences, etc.), and visual ones (facing other parties, facing the materials, etc.). The multimodal resources activate different judges’ footings, including ANIMATOR, ANIMATOR + AUTHOR and ANIMATOR + AUTHOR + PRINCIPAL, and identify the judge’s footing shifts in the courtroom. The results also demonstrate that the judge’s footing shifts perform the functions of trial organizing, information confirming, fact investigating, spokesperson of the collegial panel, law educating and so on in criminal trials.

“Do you understand these charges?”: How procedural communication in youth criminal justice court violates the rights of young offenders in Canada

This paper considers Canada’s young offenders in the context from which they enter the youth criminal courtroom. To determine how youth criminal justice courts violate the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), this analysis relates said context to several phenomena, including legal linguistics, oral language competency, literacy, communicative competency, non-verbal communication, the physical structure of youth courtrooms, and legal translation (Government of Canada eds. 2018. Youth criminal justice act. Ottawa: Government of Canada.). As a result of the standards of procedural communication upheld by the Canadian criminal justice system, young people’s rights, including the right to be respected regardless of cultural, ethnic, or linguistic differences, the right to be heard and to participate in proceedings, the right to be sentenced meaningfully, the right to privacy, and the right to be tried in a timely manner are abused in the youth criminal courtroom. Although insufficient structures of procedural communication cause these issues and are beyond the control of counsel, defense counsel are often blamed for their effects. Legal professionals must make important adjustments such as altering the formal speech required in youth criminal courtrooms, employing legal professionals with the role of translating legal jargon to young people in the courtroom, and closing youth courtrooms off from the public to reduce the YCJA violations occurring in youth criminal justice court. These adjustments are ultimately the responsibility of the Canadian criminal justice system.

An investigation of interruption in courtroom discourse

In this research project, we introduce an interdisciplinary study of language and the law—forensic linguistics. In the field of forensic linguistics, the topic of discourse probably receives the most study. The discourse phenomenon we investigated is interruption, commonly regarded as a display of power and control. Our study concentrated on observing the distributions and functions of interruption that take place in criminal courtroom discourse. Given the unique features in criminal courtroom discourse, such as the highly institutionalized nature, the strong goal orientation, the unique question–answer interaction pattern, its rigid procedure and the high stakes for the defendants, the interruption phenomenon greatly deviates away from that in other settings. For our observation, we collected data from the trial proceedings of criminal courts. The main concern is to determine whether the defendants’ right to speak and to be heard is respected by the other participants in the courtroom. Too much interruption may prevent the defendants from explaining themselves, thus infringing on their legal rights. Overall, judges and prosecutors interrupt considerably more frequently than defense lawyers and defendants. The asymmetry in treatment towards the participants in court trials can be censorable. In addition, we found that time pressure prevented judges from giving participants sufficient time to express themselves.