Computer program suggests arbitrariness of death penalty

The Christian Science Monitor has this interesting article about a computer software program used to study and predict which defendants among those sentenced to death actually get executed.  The program apparently was able to effectively predict execution outcomes without details about the committed crimes; the program only considered “facts such as age, race, sex, and marital status [of the death row defendant], along with the date and type of offense.”  Explains the article:

The implication, says Dee Wood Harper, one of the researchers and a professor of criminal justice at Loyola University in New Orleans, is that “if this mindless software can determine who is going to die and who is not going to die, then there’s some arbitrariness here in the [United States justice] system.”

I wonder what HAL-9000 might think about this study (or about a colleague being called “mindless”).