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California used faulty DUI tests for nearly 10 years, state Justice Department says

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. A police officer in Germany uses a pipette to transfer urine from a sample cup to a rapid drug test last month. A small percentage of alcohol tests used in California have shown accuracy problems. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .



WCLD: Curated Large Dataset of Criminal Cases from Wisconsin Circuit Courts

Neural Information Processing Systems

Machine learning based decision-support tools in criminal justice systems are subjects of intense discussions and academic research. There are important open questions about the utility and fairness of such tools. Academic researchers often rely on a few small datasets that are not sufficient to empirically study various real-world aspects of these questions. In this paper, we contribute WCLD, a curated large dataset of 1.5 million criminal cases from circuit courts in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. We used reliable public data from 1970 to 2020 to curate attributes like prior criminal counts and recidivism outcomes.


A Appendix

Neural Information Processing Systems

Chalkidis et al. ( 2019) introduces the ECtHR dataset that consists of 11k cases from the European Court of Human Rights. Niklaus et al. ( 2021) releases the Swiss-Judgements-Prediction dataset that consists of 85k multilingual cases-German, French, and Italian-from the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland. Xiao et al. ( 2018) introduces the CAIL dataset which consists of 2.7m Chinese criminal cases. The court debates are not publicly available in Korea. Chalkidis et al. ( 2022a) introduces a benchmark dataset for legal NLU in English focusing on Chalkidis et al. ( 2022b) investigate legal fairness over four legal judgement datasets with additional A.2 Precedent redaction rule Data subjected to anonymization are as follows Other personally identifible information: Social security number is deleted.


WCLD: Curated Large Dataset of Criminal Cases from Wisconsin Circuit Courts

Neural Information Processing Systems

Machine learning based decision-support tools in criminal justice systems are subjects of intense discussions and academic research. There are important open questions about the utility and fairness of such tools. Academic researchers often rely on a few small datasets that are not sufficient to empirically study various real-world aspects of these questions. In this paper, we contribute WCLD, a curated large dataset of 1.5 million criminal cases from circuit courts in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. We used reliable public data from 1970 to 2020 to curate attributes like prior criminal counts and recidivism outcomes.


The Election-Interference Merry-Go-Round

The New Yorker

In October, 2020, Bob Ferguson, the attorney general of Washington State, launched an initiative to combat "election interference." A press release noted Donald Trump's repeated claims that the coming election would be "rigged" against him, leading many of Ferguson's constituents to fear that the result was being delegitimized in advance. In response, Ferguson pledged to defend "the longstanding American tradition of a peaceful transition of power." This year, Ferguson ran for governor of Washington, as a Democrat. So, too, did Bob Ferguson, and Bob Ferguson.


SEMDR: A Semantic-Aware Dual Encoder Model for Legal Judgment Prediction with Legal Clue Tracing

Liu, Pengjie, Zhang, Wang, Ding, Yulong, Zhang, Xuefeng, Yang, Shuang-Hua

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) aims to form legal judgments based on the criminal fact description. However, researchers struggle to classify confusing criminal cases, such as robbery and theft, which requires LJP models to distinguish the nuances between similar crimes. Existing methods usually design handcrafted features to pick up necessary semantic legal clues to make more accurate legal judgment predictions. In this paper, we propose a Semantic-Aware Dual Encoder Model (SEMDR), which designs a novel legal clue tracing mechanism to conduct fine-grained semantic reasoning between criminal facts and instruments. Our legal clue tracing mechanism is built from three reasoning levels: 1) Lexicon-Tracing, which aims to extract criminal facts from criminal descriptions; 2) Sentence Representation Learning, which contrastively trains language models to better represent confusing criminal facts; 3) Multi-Fact Reasoning, which builds a reasons graph to propagate semantic clues among fact nodes to capture the subtle difference among criminal facts. Our legal clue tracing mechanism helps SEMDR achieve state-of-the-art on the CAIL2018 dataset and shows its advance in few-shot scenarios. Our experiments show that SEMDR has a strong ability to learn more uniform and distinguished representations for criminal facts, which helps to make more accurate predictions on confusing criminal cases and reduces the model uncertainty during making judgments. All codes will be released via GitHub.


Enhancing Criminal Case Matching through Diverse Legal Factors

Zhao, Jie, Guan, Ziyu, Zhao, Wei, Jiang, Yue

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Criminal case matching endeavors to determine the relevance between different criminal cases. Conventional methods predict the relevance solely based on instance-level semantic features and neglect the diverse legal factors (LFs), which are associated with diverse court judgments. Consequently, comprehensively representing a criminal case remains a challenge for these approaches. Moreover, extracting and utilizing these LFs for criminal case matching face two challenges: (1) the manual annotations of LFs rely heavily on specialized legal knowledge; (2) overlaps among LFs may potentially harm the model's performance. In this paper, we propose a two-stage framework named Diverse Legal Factor-enhanced Criminal Case Matching (DLF-CCM). Firstly, DLF-CCM employs a multi-task learning framework to pre-train an LF extraction network on a large-scale legal judgment prediction dataset. In stage two, DLF-CCM introduces an LF de-redundancy module to learn shared LF and exclusive LFs. Moreover, an entropy-weighted fusion strategy is introduced to dynamically fuse the multiple relevance generated by all LFs. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of DLF-CCM and show its significant improvements over competitive baselines. Code: https://github.com/jiezhao6/DLF-CCM.


Fire breaks out at Russian oil refinery; deaths, injuries reported

FOX News

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Fire broke out at an oil refinery in northwestern Russia on Sunday, resulting in deaths and injuries, local officials said. The regional governor said the fire was not caused by a Ukrainian drone strike and investigators opened a criminal case on suspicion of negligence. The fire near the city of Ukhta in Russia's northwestern Komi Republic left at least three people injured, Komi's emergencies ministry said.


Knowledge-aware Method for Confusing Charge Prediction

Cheng, Xiya, Bi, Sheng, Qi, Guilin, Wang, Yongzhen

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automatic charge prediction task aims to determine the final charges based on fact descriptions of criminal cases, which is a vital application of legal assistant systems. Conventional works usually depend on fact descriptions to predict charges while ignoring the legal schematic knowledge, which makes it difficult to distinguish confusing charges. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-attentive neural network model, which introduces legal schematic knowledge about charges and exploit the knowledge hierarchical representation as the discriminative features to differentiate confusing charges. Our model takes the textual fact description as the input and learns fact representation through a graph convolutional network. A legal schematic knowledge transformer is utilized to generate crucial knowledge representations oriented to the legal schematic knowledge at both the schema and charge levels. We apply a knowledge matching network for effectively incorporating charge information into the fact to learn knowledge-aware fact representation. Finally, we use the knowledge-aware fact representation for charge prediction. We create two real-world datasets and experimental results show that our proposed model can outperform other state-of-the-art baselines on accuracy and F1 score, especially on dealing with confusing charges.