You Have The Right To Confront Your Accuser. What If Your Accuser Is An Algorithm?

In criminal proceedings it’s become increasingly common for software-based technology to be used in garnering or processing evidence, or to calculate a sentence. Defense attorneys who want to challenge these processes often find that courts are willing to protect them as trade secrets – a trend, says Jason Tashea in the ABA Journal, that is trampling on the constitutional rights of defendants. “While most pronounced with DNA technology,” he says, “favoring corporate trade secrets over defendant’s procedural rights has been applied to software and technology built by private companies, such as breathalyzers, algorithmic risk assessments and cell-site simulators, a technology used by police to pinpoint the location of a cellphone.”