Chief Justice briefly mentions sentencing in AI discussion in his annual year-end report

The Chief Justice of the United States always closes out a calendar year by releasing a year-end report on the federal judiciary.  The 2023 version of this report has an intriguing disquisition on the Federal Judiciary’s “steps into the modern era of information technology.”  The whole essay is worth a read, and here are snippets:

As 2023 draws to a close with breathless predictions about the future of Artificial Intelligence, some may wonder whether judges are about to become obsolete.  I am sure we are not — but equally confident that technological changes will continue to transform our work….

At its core, AI combines algorithms and enormous data sets to solve problems.  Its many forms and applications include the facial recognition we use to unlock our smart phones and the voice recognition we use to direct our smart televisions.  Law professors report with both awe and angst that AI apparently can earn Bs on law school assignments and even pass the bar exam. Legal research may soon be unimaginable without it….

Many professional tennis tournaments, including the US Open, have replaced line judges with optical technology to determine whether 130 mile per hour serves are in or out.  These decisions involve precision to the millimeter.  And there is no discretion; the ball either did or did not hit the line.  By contrast, legal determinations often involve gray areas that still require application of human judgment.

Machines cannot fully replace key actors in court.  Judges, for example, measure the sincerity of a defendant’s allocution at sentencing.  Nuance matters: Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation,a fleeting break in eye contact. And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.

In addition to notable tech talk, the 2023 year-end report includes federal court caseload data in an appendix.  Here are some data excerpts that might interest federal criminal justice fans:

Criminal appeals were down three percent from the prior year to 9,649….  Prisoner petitions accounted for 23 percent of appeals filings (a total of 9,089), and 87 percent of prisoner petitions were filed pro se, compared with 36 percent of other civil filings….

The federal district courts docketed 66,027 criminal defendant filings (excluding transfers) in FY 2023, a reduction of three percent from the prior year.  The largest categories were filings for defendants accused of immigration offenses, which increased three percent to 19,645, and filings for defendants charged with drug offenses, which fell 8 percent to 18,103….

A total of 122,824 persons were under post-conviction supervision on September 30, 2023, a decrease of less than 1 percent from the prior year.  Of that number, 110,112 were serving terms of supervised release after leaving correctional institutions, an increase of less than 1 percent from FY 2022.  Cases activated in the pretrial services system, including pretrial diversions, fell three percent to 71,297.