Arbitrariness of capital punishment, cont'd
You quote the researchers (May 1, letter May 10):
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."
They have it backwards. The fact that "mindless software" can accurately predict outcomes is evidence that those outcomes are *not* arbitrary, but closely follow the kind of simple rules that can be programmed into a computer.
Whether this is a good thing, or not, is still a valid question. -- Kent Budge, Los Alamos, N.M.