Emergence of first human societies gave birth to the first set of social norms and codes. Gradually evolving over time these codes and norms subsequently became known as laws.
They became the foundation of human civilization and provided guiding principles for societies to manage themselves. They draw a clear line on how to differentiate between what is acceptable and what is not and clearly defined ways to resolve situations linked to the breakers of the established norms. Over the course of human evolution this basic system of judgement transformed into complex system of legal court that presides over two main functions - determining the guilt and defining the punishment.
Human history can give us numerous examples of how system of punishment has evolved over time. Since ancient times we can track references of what societies were doing with those that broke its laws and we can notice how gradually punishment itself was striving to become more humanistic. Even thousand years later still the main topic of numerous discussions taking place in the sphere of law lies in the area of punishment. In recent years technology, for example, has helped to make house arrest a viable and workable form of punishment that at the same time remains deeply humanistic. Not to mention cancellation of death penalties and multiple prison reforms that are underway in several countries.
However, the primary function of legal court and that is the process of determining the guilt has remained untouched for thousands of years.
Its main flaw is that people always JUDGE people. But we all know that people are inclined to emotions.
We can all be bound to subjectivity, peer and social pressure, fear, anger, sympathy and at times corruption. There are many decision influencers and sometimes it can be beyond our human power to control them. We are only humans after all.
We can cite many instances where judge’s and juries’ perceptions of the defendant based on their appearance and body language, ethnicity, social status, network and connections influenced trial’s verdict, sending innocent to prison and freeing the criminal.
Lawyers’ instruct the defendant on how to look and behave in court, how to win the judge and juries over. Think about trial rehearsals practice that exists to help prepare defendant to appear in front of the court. Defendant is often deprived of the right to be oneself in court and needs to learn to play the game of pretense to survive and get a better judgment.
Control your body language, control your voice pitch, control your body posture and how you sit in court, control which direction your eyeballs move when you talk, and the list goes on and on. There are just so many personal details that can impact other people’s opinion about us.
It is believed that between 70% to 93% of information is communicated nonverbally. However, can we confidently say that we interpret such non-verbal communications always accurately and correctly? “The Shawshank Redemption”, a 1994 Hollywood drama that depicts a story of Andy Dufresne, who without any direct evidence against him was wrongly convicted to double life imprisonment due to something described as “exceptionally arrogant and cold behavior during his trial”, gives a solid reference to the problem of personal perceptions clouding our judgment.
To make the matters worse even whole selection of the juries for the trial has become a science of its own. Access to personal and background information on potential juries leads both attorney and prosecutor to try their best at defining which jury members will be more inclined to follow their narrative and with which side they will most likely sympathize, thus maximizing or diminishing chances of the defendant.
But should it really be this way? Can such vital matter as human life be completely in the hands of our personal perceptions? Is this indeed the best we can all expect and do? We believe that not. The justice can’t have eyes. To be really fair it must be blind.
So like technology allowed to make punishment more humanistic we can strive to make the judgment process more humanistic and more fair too, where people will be freed from their emotions and the weight of their perceptions and will be able to concentrate on judging and considering the facts only and not the people themselves.
Let us present you FairJustice – a digital court system that completely takes human emotions out of equation making the process unbiased and transparent. It touches 3 crucial aspects of court case management – selection of judges and juries, case allocation and case records.
FairJustice is not about making judgment process automated or robotic. It cannot and should never be. But FairJustice uses the best technology can offer and makes the Justice truly blind. So that anyone notwithstanding their ethnicity, social status, appearance and body language can have a truly unbiased trial free of emotions, subjectivity, social pressure and corruption. A fair trial where facts will prevail over emotional vulnerability of human nature. A fair chance for our human society to evolve and get over the flaws of our human nature.