A courtroom with a one way mirror where the judge / jury can not see the defendant and the plaintiff. The defendants can see the judge / jury though. After all its only fair that you can look into the eyes of the judge who sentenced you to some horrible punishment. (two dots would mark the place where defendants eyes normally would be so that eye contact is possible and we don't get the following awkward situations: Judge looks intensely at a trash can and says "People like you are trash. You are hereby sentenced to 3 years of hard labour")

Bonus points for deaf justice where everything said is translated STT and then back out TTS so that everyone involved including the lawyers sounds like a robot. Statues would have to be outfitted with earplugs too, so that symbolism remains in sync.

Bonus++ points if court rules make it harder to guess socioeconomic status, gender, age and religion of parties involved
-- ixnaum, Jan 04 2022

Trouble is, you haven't eliminated the biases and partyality of data gathering, selection, interpretation, presentation, reception and cognition, any or all of which can bias the decision. The only truly unbiased way to do this is random selection. So, choose a % of the population to be imprisoned, and randomly select a certain percentage of individuals to be lifted, and a certain percentage of them to be sentenced, and a distribution of them to give sentence duration. Could use dice or a roulette wheel kind of gadget.
-- pocmloc, Jan 04 2022


A person's appearance can be important in making a legal judgement. For example, a large overweight person is unlikely to have been the burglar who escaped via a tiny window smaller than their head.
-- xenzag, Jan 04 2022


though I'm not even remotely a fan of ubiquitous surveillance, but in terms of guilt or innocence of "physical" crimes, the best investment is fairly obviously in surveillance, be it in cctv cameras, drones, or bodycams on cops

being able to FACE your accuser is judged a fundamental right in modern justice systems. You definitely don't want to eliminate that.

the biases you are presuming here that are appearance based are already manipulated by both prosecutors and defense attorneys in both venue shopping (in civil cases) and jury selection and in the appeals process, of course.

despite some self-regulation in recent years in the media, the jury pool already has a perception of what kind of stereotype performs what crime (e.g. even in the type of crime, like white collar crime). So by not presenting say the gang member in a clean shaven, suit-dressed look, you might be hurting their chances.

this idea in short is not a good idea, especially if your goal is to somehow improve the odds for the defendant.

which is not to say there are no biases, or that those biases are not exploited.
-- theircompetitor, Jan 04 2022


//partyality of data gathering//

[marked-for-tagline]
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jan 04 2022


I can still see the prosecuter implying something anyway, like "as a minority, he...", while the defense will say something like "his hands are too big for the gloves".
-- 4and20, Jan 06 2022



random, halfbakery