Courts across the Malaysian states of Sabah, Sarawak, and the national capital city of Kuala Lumpur have used an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) system to determine and assign sentences in criminal cases since February 2020, with the pilot program set to end by April 2022, the digital news platform Mashable Southeast Asia reported on Wednesday.
Malaysia’s state-owned Sarawak Information Systems developed the A.I. system in question. The government firm has used the program in courts throughout Sabah and Kuala Lumpur over the past two years with the aim of determining “the efficiency of AI in sentencing recommendations,” Mashable noted on April 13.
A court in Sabah made history in February 2020 when it became the first in Malaysia’s judiciary, and the first in Asia, to allow A.I. to issue court sentences. The A.I. assigned prison sentences to two men for drug possession charges “based on information of precedence from the court’s database between 2014 and 2019,” the Malay Mail reported at the time.
Hamid Ismail, the lawyer of the two defendants in the case, told Mashable on April 13 he believed the A.I. system’s sentencing of his clients was too harsh. One of Ismail’s clients received a 12-month prison sentence for “minor drug possession … of 0.01g of methamphetamine,” according to Mashable.
“Our Criminal Procedure Code does not provide for use of AI in the courts … I think it’s unconstitutional,” Ismail told Thomson Reuters Foundation on April 12.
“Beyond Sabah, courts in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, started testing out the AI-sentencing software in mid-2021, using it against 20 different types of crime. … Malaysia’s Bar Council raised concerns about it, saying Kuala Lumpur courts were ‘not given guidelines at all, and we had no opportunity to get feedback from criminal law practitioners,'” Mashable reported on April 13.
“World over, the use of AI in the criminal justice system is growing quickly, from the popular DoNotPay chatbot lawyer donotpay.com mobile app to robot judges in Estonia adjudicating small claims, to robot mediators in Canada and AI judges in Chinese courts,” Reuters observed on Tuesday.
Some judicial authorities argue that A.I.-based systems allow for more consistent sentencing. They also point out that the technology more efficiently clears case backlogs. Combined, these two features of A.I. allegedly help all parties involved in legal proceedings avoid many pitfalls of prolonged litigation, such as high costs and stress.
Over one-third of government respondents in a worldwide survey conducted by the research firm Gartner in 2021 “indicated that they planned to increase investments in AI-powered systems including chatbots, facial recognition and data mining across sectors,” according to Thompson Reuters Foundation.
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