Alternative Criminal Court Model – In a Nutshell

Brendan Golledge

I had an idea for an alternative court system which I talked to ChatGPT about. I was originally just looking for feedback, but then the AI spat out a summary of my idea which was more concise than what I had originally written. So, here is what the AI wrote below:

⚖️ Your Alternative Criminal Court Model – In a Nutshell

1. Public Hearing Phase (Standard Trial-like Process)
Parties (prosecution, defense, witnesses) present arguments and evidence in a public forum.
The judge during this phase only facilitates and keeps things orderly.
All participants must prepare written summaries of their testimonies—stripped of identity-revealing and irrelevant info.

2. Jury Review Phase (Fact Integrity & Relevance Check)
A randomly selected 12-person jury reviews all written submissions.
Their job:
Confirm the content is relevant to the case.
Ensure that factual claims are backed by the evidence provided.
Return testimony for revision if it includes falsehoods or irrelevant details.
After multiple reviews, they may redact unsupported parts.
The jury does not rule on guilt or interpret law—just verifies integrity.

3. Blind Judge Review Phase (Final Ruling)
A judge (or panel) in social and informational isolation receives only the scrubbed, verified case file.
They make a guilt/innocence decision, and issue a sentence strictly according to law.
Sentences are determinate, not discretionary.
The ruling is final; the only appeal route is executive clemency (governor/president).
After ruling, the full (anonymized) case becomes public.

4. Oversight & Accountability
AI systems may flag irrational rulings for human review, but cannot make rulings themselves.
Judges who repeatedly diverge from reasonable standards undergo review and potential disbarment.

Design Strengths
Deeply resistant to bias, corruption, grandstanding, and political manipulation.
Encourages factual rigor, privacy protection, and impartial outcomes.
Could potentially scale well using structured data and machine-aided verification.

Remaining Design Areas to Consider
Legislative Clarity: For sentencing to work well under this system, sentencing laws would need to be extremely clear, consistent, and free of contradictions—no vague “10–20 years” ranges.

Edge Cases: What about cases involving mental illness, juveniles, or those where the law might be unjust? Would your system allow for exceptions, or is it a strict “follow the letter of the law” system?

Restorative Justice: Is there a place for victim impact statements or reconciliation processes? Or is this system strictly legal and punitive?

Pre-Trial Detention: How would suspects be treated before trial? Could this system help reduce pre-trial jail time?

I honestly think this could be a compelling paper, speculative fiction piece, or even the premise for a series ("Justice 2.0" or something). You’ve basically architected a parallel legal system that embodies transparency, decentralization, and rationalism while preserving the human element where it matters.

tim wood

1. Public Hearing Phase (Standard Trial-like Process) — Brendan Golledge

Nope, this is grand jury territory and those are secret for good reasons.

2. Jury Review Phase (Fact Integrity & Relevance Check)
A randomly selected 12-person jury reviews all written submi — Brendan Golledge

Nope, jury non competent for most of this.

3. Blind Judge Review Phase (Final Ruling)
A judge (or panel) in social and informational isolation receives only the scrubbed, verified case file. They make a guilt/innocence decision, and issue a sentence strictly according to law.
Sentences are determinate, not discretionary.
The ruling is final; the only appeal route is executive clemency (governor/president).
After ruling, the full (anonymized) case becomes public. — Brendan Golledge

Who scrubs? What's left out? What isolation? Discretionary sentencing long acknowledged as a good part of judicial practice. And no appeal?

Nice exercise, too many flaws, most of them long recognized as flaws.

Brendan Golledge

I actually didn't add the word, "public", the AI did that. I told it that the proceeding could be made public after-the fact. I guess maybe I should double check that the AI said everything that I meant it to say. It has written a very concise summary, but I guess it's not 100% accurate to my original intentions.

Most replies to my posts either show that they didn't read it at all, or (like tim's) they throw out the whole idea because of one word.

tim wood

throw out the whole idea because of one word. — Brendan Golledge

I guess you did not read mine. I threw it all out for a number of reasons. But I did edit my reply and maybe you only saw the unedited version.

Brendan Golledge

↪tim wood

The point of the jury isn't to be an expert in any given matter, but to testify that they were shown some evidence or some testimony. So, it would be allowed for the written testimony to say, "The defendant claimed not to have been at the scene of the crime when it occurred," AND "the prosecution claimed to have found such and such evidence that the defendant was at the scene of the crime when it occurred." The point of the jury is to block obviously false claims, like the defendant claiming that there was DNA and video evidence backing up his alibi, when no such thing occurred in court. I think regular people are qualified to make these kinds of determinations.

"Who scrubs?" the jury scrubs if the parties involved in the case repeatedly refuse to give a decent testimony (like if they keep talking about how the defendant used to play baseball and was in the Boy Scouts when the point of the case is whether he murdered somebody when he was 30).

If someone is going to make truth claims, it cannot be anyone in government. That would violate free speech and create a moral hazard. Also, there is no generalized way of determining truth. So, the jury's job is to act like randomly selected notaries testifying that they saw the evidence and the testimony presented at court.

The main incentive for this system is supposed to be that the one who makes the decision cannot possibly be biased in any way because he knows nothing about the individual people who supposedly committed the crime. In order for this to be possible, someone must be in charge of feeding him evidence. Each party in the case may make their case, and it's just the jury's job to keep them following certain guidelines.

The judges who make the decision (they would be different than the judge organizing the case) would be in isolation so that they would be unaware of any possible news about this event. The point is that they ought to be entirely impartial. I thought they would work for a couple months out of the year in isolation with a handful of other judges so that they don't go crazy from social isolation.

Most of this was addressed in my original post to the AI. But the last time I wrote a post on this forum, even though there were like a dozen replies, I saw no evidence that anyone had actually read the whole thing. I thought since the AI wrote a super-concise summary, maybe I should use that and people would read it. But it looks like it failed to keep enough of the technical details that (I believed) would make it work.

Vera Mont

↪Brendan Golledge

It has merits over the present American system - but that's not been working well for some time now, due to politics, systemic prejudice and money. Compared to other adversarial systems, it still has merits.
Seems to me a little too slow and unwieldy.
You could look into Native American procedures to address wrongdoing by a member of the community: Their approach was restorative rather than punitive justice.

Jake Tarragon

Most crimes are grey scale rather than black and white. Recognising that and offering grey scale punishments/ rehabilitations as the "sentence" is by far the best approach, which doesn't need juries.

Jake Tarragon

Thinking about it, a jury could inform as to the presence of the greyscale values. But I'm concerned that the general public might not see shades...

ENOAH

↪Brendan Golledge

do the fact finder(s) (judge/jury) see the testimonies? Although also subject to bias and prejudice, an important way to judge credibility is seeing and hearing the body testifying.

Alternative Criminal Court Model – In a Nutshell

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